De Rebus Antiquis Et Novis

Two blogs you really have to look at

2012-01-03T20:00:00.003Z

The first one is a brilliantly erratic Poemas del río Wang. Multilingual, colorful, aimless, meditative and absolute must read.

The second one is in Russian, but in most cases all you need to read is the year in the post title. Visual History (a.k.a. "Photo archives to the people!") is a collection of old photographs. Mostly, but not exclusively, Russian, including the famous photos by Prokudin-Gorsky and equally brilliant images made in USSR by journalists of the "Life" magazine Howard Sochurek and Carl Mydans. Absolute must see.

Here are some links to articles in Visual History:

Nizhny Novgorod in 1958 (by Sochurek)
Travel of an Americal along Volga in 1958 (by Sochurek)
Sports parade in Moscow in 1945
My hometown, Samara, in 1958 (Sochurek again)
Post-war Byelorussia (1950s)
Moscow in 1959 (by Mydans)
Pskov around 1960
Rostov: modern and Prokudin-Gorsky's photos
Travel from Moscow to Rostov in 1964 (by Jacques Dupâquier)
Soviet cars on the Expo 1958 in Brussels

P.S.: while writing, I found also this collection of photographs: Kansas City with a Russian accent.

Illustrations to War and Peace

2011-10-02T19:00:00.004Z

I've found an old album of watercolor illustrations to “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy. The illustrations were published in 1893 as a free supplement to magazine “Sever” (North). The titles are (in order):

Battery of captain Tushin near Schoengraben
Napoleon and emperor Alexander I meeting in Tilsit
The first ball of Natasha Rostova
Rostovs hunt with hounds in Otradnoye
Rostovs go to Melyukovs on yule
Napoleon and Lavrushka during the march from Vyazma to Tsarevo-Zaimische
Kutuzov on Polkonnaya mount before the war council in Fili
Count Rostopchin and merchant's son Vereshchagin near the governor's house in Moscow
Natasha Rostova and Andrey Bolkonsky in Mytishchi
The French execute arsonists in Moscow
Death of Petya Rostov

Below you can see a preview of the album (all 20 pages):

Press the icon in the lower right corner of the preview to switch to fullscreen.

To download the full PDF file, right-click in the preview window and select Download document...

How we almost killed each other

2011-09-27T18:42:00.003Z

In 2009, I wrote about a fictional occupation of the USSR by the USA: The World War that never happened. Recently, I learned about some more wars that never happened. Or was it the same war?

The article was published at OrientalReview.org: Britain Planned to Attack USSR on June 12, 1941

The first potential war took place in the early 1940, when Britain and France planned an invasion into the Soviet Union. Yugoslavian, Romanian, Greek and Turkish armies, directed by British and French governments, had to attack Soviet Caucasus and from the Balkans. Perhaps, this was why they had rejected the Soviet proposal to join forces to contain the Nazi Germany.

The goal of the second potential war (June-July 1940) were Soviet oil fields: “Baku bombing would put the Soviets into the critical situation, as long as Moscow requires every single drop of oil that is produced today in order to provide the fuel for the Soviet motorized units and the agricultural equipment”.

The Soviet oil fields worried the European allies even in 1941: “On the 12th of June Heads of Staff Committee decided to assume the measures that would allow to conduct the strikes against the oil refining plants in Baku using the average bombers from Mosul in Iraqi Kurdistan without any delays”

Some years later, when the Soviet Union recuperated after the WWII, the Soviets managed to retaliate. At least, in the same potential way. The “Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (PHP)” features a huge amount of Warsaw Pact documents, including some war plans, like this 1964 plan: “This war plan provides describes the operations of the Czechoslovak People's Army in wartime. Under the scenario, the NATO countries launch surprise nuclear strikes against the main political and economic centers of Czechoslovakia. It also assumes that the combat actions of both NATO and Warsaw Pact troops in the initial period of war will have the character of forward contact battles. It offers conclusions as to the anticipated opposing NATO units and enemy war aims. The document lists the specific tasks and lines of advance for major elements of the Czechoslovak People's Army, with the main axis of attack concentrated in the direction of Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Strasbourg, and Epinal, and with the aim of holding the areas of Langres, Besançon, and Epinal one week after the outbreak of war.”

As far as I can understand, the Soviet war plans were based on the premise that NATO would attack first. The NATO plans seem to agree.

Rodric Braithwaite on the Afghan war 1979-89

2011-03-05T21:32:00.000Z

Rodric Braithwaite, former U.K. ambassador to Russia and the author of the book “Afgantsy. The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89” was interviewed by Olga Smirnova from the BBC Russian Service. The original text of the interview is here: "Афганцы": новая книга бывшего британского посла в Москве. I could not find the English text, so below is an automatic translation made by Google, where I fixed the most obvious errors, trying to make the text a bit easier to understand.

The book "Afgantsy. The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89" by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to Moscow from 1988 to 1992, was published in Britain.

After 1992, Rodric Braithwaite was, in particular, advisor to Prime Minister John Major on international affairs and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

"Afgantsy" is the third book of Braithwaite. The previous one, "Moscow 1941: the city and its inhabitants," was devoted to the Battle of Moscow. The new book continues the theme of the people at war. BBC correspondent BBC Olga Smirnova interviewed the author.

BBC: Why did you choose this topic for the new book?

Rodric Braithwaite: I think there are few good books, especially in the West, about what really happened in Afghanistan. And I am very sympathetic to the Soviet soldiers who fought there. They were strongly criticized outside the Soviet Union and in Russia.

As in my previous book on Russia, I wanted to explain to the Western reader that there is nothing unusual in Russians and that they are people just like us. They are no worse and no better than us. And you can understand Russian politicians, Russian soldiers, Soviet women who served in Afghanistan, and there were many - they can be understood in human terms.

I would like to amend the myths about the Afghan war, which existed during the Cold War.

BBC: What do you think were those myths?

RB: In the West there are two main myths about the Afghan war. The first - that when invading Afghanistan, the Soviet Union pursued imperial aims, that is, that they wanted to expand the Soviet empire and would jeopardize the supply of oil to the West from the Gulf countries.

Of course, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan for very different reasons. The Soviet Union launched the Afghan campaign for defensive purposes. Their concern was the instability in Afghanistan, which bordered on the USSR. The Soviets were concerned, probably wrongly, that Americans would use Afghan territory against the interests of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet leaders were also worried by drug trafficking from Afghanistan.

And it is true that the Soviet leaders hoped to build a better society in Afghanistan.Similar hopes were in Western countries before the recent invasion of Afghanistan.

A second major myth is associated with the reasons why the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. It did not happen because the Soviet Union was defeated in this war. Nobody won a victory over the 40-th army. The army itself left Afghanistan, because it became obvious that the war was futile, it clearly did not achieve the goals.

The third myth is that a major role in the Afghan war was played by Stinger anti-aircraft guided missiles supplied by the Americans to the Mujahideen. This is totally wrong. Gorbachev invited the Afghan leader to Moscow in 1985 and told him that the Soviet troops are going to withdraw from Afghanistan, and the first Soviet helicopter was show down by a Stinger only 11 months after this conversation. So the weapons supplied by the U.S. had no effect on the political decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.

Well, probably, the last myth is that the war in Afghanistan was a particularly brutal war. Yes, the Soviets bombed villages, killing many civilians. But what happened in Afghanistan was no worse than what had happened in Vietnam. War is always cruel. And all military interventions are particularly brutal, especially when combined with the civil war, as it was in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

BBC: When writing the book you talked to a lot of veterans. What's new did you discover talking to them?

RB: I was most surprised that the veterans are returning to Afghanistan, where they were fought. They meet the people they fought against. I did not expect it. They return to Afghanistan as tourists.

On YouTube you can watch films they made in Afghanistan. They return to the outposts, where they served for many months. They come to Afghanistan because they love this country and love the Afghans.

BBC: In 2008 you visited Afghanistan. How do they now recall the war of 1979-89?

RB: In 2008 I asked the Afghans, when it was better in Afghanistan - with the Russians or now?

And Afghans always answered: "Why do you ask such a stupid question? Of course, it was better when the Russians had been here."

Even one of the Mujahideen, with whom I spoke told me that "At least, the Russians fought as honest soldiers, and Americans simply destroy us from the air."

BBC: In your book you intentionally avoid comparing the Afghan war of 1979-89, and the current war?

RB: Of course, intentionally, because between there is a big difference between the wars. My book is historical one, not political, and I'm not trying to enter in controversy.

While there are parallels between the two wars, may the readers themselves think about it.

Western politicians are now saying that we will prevail in Afghanistan.

We say that we will leave there, when a strong government and a strong Afghan army will appear in Kabul and then things will be fine in Afghanistan.

The Soviet leaders told the same, but after they had stopped supporting the government of Najibullah, the Afghan civil war started.

One has only to read Clausewitz to realize that military victory does not mean much without a political victory.

BBC: In the book you often rely on the memoirs of Soviet politicians. How reasonable is this, considering that in memoirs the events are often distorted?

RB: Of course, a memoir is an unreliable source of information. But the story in general can not be completely impartial.

Even the archival documents can not be objective, as is thought by historians.

I am a former civil servant, and I know how the documents are written and why. It's not that simple.

BBC: Some of the Afghan Mujahideen claim that the world should be grateful to them, since they, when waging a struggle with the Soviet Union, caused the downfall of communism. In your opinion, are they right?

RB: This is a huge exaggeration. I do not want to belittle the achievements of the Mujahideen. But they failed to win the 40 th Army, which left Afghanistan on their own will, in an organized way.

The Soviet Union dissolved because of many, many factors. And the Afghan war is just a small factor.

It is true that the war in Afghanistan has helped to undermine the faith of ordinary Soviet people in their government. I do not know whether this is true, but Chernobyl had even more influence on public opinion.

BBC: In recent years, several films about the Afghan war were made in Russia, there was a number of publications, particularly during the celebration of the 20 anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Do you think Russia is still trying to comprehend the war?

RB: There are few good films about the Afghan war. Among those the veterans like, a really good movie is "Afghan Breakdown", filmed in 1991. Мне кажется, что он достоверно изображает войну. It seems to me that it portrays the war accurately. Veterans do not like the "Ninth company", which enjoyed success in Russia and abroad.

As for the comprehension of the war, many those who served in Afghanistan, say more and more often that when Yeltsin cancelled the supply of weapons, fuel and food to the Afghan leader Najibullah, it was a betrayal, and led to Najibullah's downfall.

BBC: During the war years of 1979-89 up to half a million civilians were killed in Afghanistan, and three million have become refugees, which is a large figure for a country with 15 million people. В популярных книгах о войне часто происходит обезличивание местного населения вражеской страны и его страданий. In the popular books about the war the local population of enemy countries and their suffering are often depersonalized. And this leads to the fact that cruelty against this faceless population becomes more acceptable. When paying attention mainly to Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, don't you do the same?

Р.Б.: Я написал эту книгу, потому что Запад обезличил русских солдат в Афганистане. RB: I wrote this book because the West deprived of individuality the Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. And I wanted to repay it, pay attention to them and portray them as people and not as an enemy.

I did not write about the Mujahideen, because many have already written about them before me.
I hope that the reader does not have the impression that I was demonizing the Mujahideen. They were brave fighters. Yes, sometimes they showed the cruelty, as well as Russians did.
I think that in any war demonization of the enemy is inevitable.Then it is easier to get soldiers to fight.

I hope that my book makes it clear my attitude to the war - that war is horrible, but that, unfortunately, the desire to fight is an innate human trait.

I do not think the wars will ever stop, which means that we will continue to demonize the enemy. It's human nature.

Autobiography by Grigory Grigorov

2011-01-24T17:27:00.004Z

I can't say I enjoy reading about that scary period of the Russian history called the Civil War, but I often read memoirs about those years. I often think about their authors: what did they think, what did they feel, what did they hope for, what made them join one or the other side in that war. The war must have started subtly, creepingly, insensibly. Some of them were, probably, afraid of the German army, but then the Reds or the Whites came to the city and the people faced a simple choice: they could join that army or become, well, subjects of preventive actions. Had I lived in 1919 or 1920, I would, probably, try to avoid both sides, but, of course, I dislike the bolsheviks more. Could it have been the other way round if I really lived then? I believe, yes. Because I am sure that the communists were not all bloodthirsty maniacs. Like Whites, the Reds fought for a better life for the people. Well, some of them did.

Recently, I finished reading memoirs of Grigory Grigorov. He was born in 1900 in Ukraine, in a family of a poor tailor. The book starts in 1905, when his family lived in Aleksandrovsk, with one of his first recollections, a pogrom. In 1911, he graduated from a five-year Jewish school and started working: at a footwear factory, as a newspaper boy, an assistant at a barbershop... In 1915 he made acquaintance with a couple of students who ran education groups for workers and who helped him find good books, and he started learning. In just two years, Grigory managed to prepare for the gymnasium exams, which included math, geography, history, physics, chemistry, biology, German and Latin languages. In 1917, he was already reading Caesar in Latin and Schiller in German. At the same time, he read philosophy books, books about religion, classical Greek literature, Shakespeare's works. What's more important, these two students who became his close friends, were socialists. They introduced him to Marxism. By that time Grigorov was working at a factory, and the choice of socialism was quite natural for him.

He mentions some people, like young turner Bondarenko or foundryman Likhachov, who told him unanimously that the revolution, should it happen, would fail, because the workers would not be able to keep the power. "Either bourgeois, or opportunists would exploit the movement of the Russian proletariat", they told. Grigorov was not that pessimistic, so he joined the socialist party. In 1919, he worked as a spy on the territory occupied/liberated by the White Army. He was caught and put to jail, but liberated by anarchists of Nestor Makhno. Since then, he treated anarchists with respect. For a year he fought in the Red Army, but for some personal reason he prefers not to tell a lot about this period. In 1920, he decides that he has had enough and goes to Moscow. He always wanted to learn, so he enters the Moscow State University, where he studies philosophy and social sciences. In 1922 he entered the philosophical department of Institute of Red Professors.

It was a magnificent period for him, when he met a lot of great figures of the Russian culture: Mayakovsky, Stanislavsky, Chaliapin, Yesenin, when he was lectured by famous scientists and talked to influential politicians. In 1923, the bell rang. Someone reported to the party Central Committee that he promoted anti-Marxist views. As a warning, he was sent as a lecturer to a small town, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, then to Siberia: to Tomsk and then to Novosibirsk.

The first volume of the memoirs, the only one I had, ends in 1927. The other volumes were not published in Russia, but, fortunately, I found a blog of Grigorov's grand-daughter (Russian History). You can find a short synopsis of the whole book in a much better English there. Besides, that blog features large extracts from the books, so I will not go into further details. The blog authors told me they had published the second and the third volumes in Israel. These volumes cover Grigorov's life from the first arrest in 1928, return home in 1930, second arrest in 1934, twenty years in prison and all the following life in USSR. In the foreword to the first volume, the author promises some interesting news in the following books. So, he tells about a group of army officers who in 1926 met with Trotsky to propose a putsch to overthrow Stalin...

What is so interesting about this book? Firstly, it's a detailed description of life in the early USSR. Secondly, it is one of few biographies written by the people from the other side of the revolution. And, finally, to a certain degree, it has explained to me the way of thinking of the people who fought in the Red Army for the bolsheviks. Grigorov, like many others, was disappointed with the way the things went. I'd say he should have listened better to the wise people, like Bondarenko and Likhachov. There's a bunch of things where I would disagree with Grigory Grigorov, but he had made his choice and the book is a frank justification of that choice.

A bit later I read another book of memoirs, by Sergei Golitsyn, son of prince Mikhail Golitsyn, who, of course, disliked the bolsheviks. Actually, he never even tried to oppose them, but he hated them with all his heart. Paradoxically, this book has also helped me understand what brought people to the camp of the revolutionaries. Golitsyn's aristocratic arrogance and disdain towards all those who belong to the lower classes really made me feel what the bolsheviks must have called "the class feeling". So, Grigorov was not really that wrong when he joined the revolution, I believe. His books is a valuable source of information and I hope it will be made available in English soon. At least, Russian edition is already available in the library of Harvard university.

A quotation from Leo Tolstoy

2010-11-21T11:04:00.005Z

One more post to commemorate 100th anniversary of the death of count Leo Tolstoy. Below is a quotation from L. Tolstoy's essay “The kingdom of god is within you”. In spite of the title, this is not a study in religion. It's a strong political statement, absolutely modern even though it was written 120 years ago (from July 1890 to May 1893).

Governments and the ruling classes no longer take their stand on right or even on the semblance of justice, but on a skillful organization carried to such a point of perfection by the aid of science that everyone is caught in the circle of violence and has no chance of escaping from it. This circle is made up now of four methods of working upon men, joined together like the limes of a chain ring.

The first and oldest method is intimidation. This consists in representing the existing state organization--whatever it may be, free republic or the most savage despotism--as something sacred and immutable, and therefore following any efforts to alter it with the cruellest punishments. This method is in use now--as it has been from olden times--wherever there is a government: in Russia against the so-called Nihilists, in America against Anarchists, in France against Imperialists, Legitimists, Communards, and Anarchists.

Railways, telegraphs, telephones, photographs, and the great perfection of the means of getting rid of men for years, without killing them, by solitary confinement, where, hidden from the world, they perish and are forgotten, and the many other modern inventions employed by government, give such power that when once authority has come into certain hands, the police, open and secret, the administration and prosecutors, jailers and executioners of all kinds, do their work so zealously that there is no chance of overturning the government, however cruel and senseless it may be.

The second method is corruption. It consists in plundering the industrious working people of their wealth by means of taxes and distributing it in satisfying the greed of officials, who are bound in return to support and keep up the oppression of the people. These bought officials, from the highest ministers to the poorest copying clerks, make up an unbroken network of men bound together by the same interest--that of living at the expense of the people. They become the richer the more submissively they carry out the will of the government; and at all times and places, sticking at nothing, in all departments support by word and deed the violence of government, on which their own prosperity also rests.

The third method is what I can only describe as hypnotizing the people. This consists in checking the moral development of men, and by various suggestions keeping them back in the ideal of life, outgrown by mankind at large, on which the power of government rests. This hypnotizing process is organized at the present in the most complex manner, and starting from their earliest childhood, continues to act on men till the day of their death. It begins in their earliest years in the compulsory schools, created for this purpose, in which the children have instilled into them the ideas of life of their ancestors, which are in direct antagonism with the conscience of the modern world. In countries where there is a state religion, they teach the children the senseless blasphemies of the Church catechisms, together with the duty of obedience to their superiors. In republican states they teach them the savage superstition of patriotism and the same pretended obedience to the governing authorities.

The process is kept up during later years by the encouragement of religious and patriotic superstitions.

The religious superstition is encouraged by establishing, with money taken from the people, temples, processions, memorials, and festivals, which, aided by painting, architecture, music, and incense, intoxicate the people, and above all by the support of the clergy, whose duty consists in brutalizing the people and keeping them in a permanent state of stupefaction by their teaching, the solemnity of their services, their sermons, and their interference in private life--at births, deaths, and marriages. The patriotic superstition is encouraged by the creation, with money taken from the people, of national fêtes, spectacles, monuments, and festivals to dispose men to attach importance to their own nation, and to the aggrandizement of the state and its rulers, and to feel antagonism and even hatred for other nations. With these objects under despotic governments there is direct prohibition against printing and disseminating books to enlighten the people, and everyone who might rouse the people from their lethargy is exiled or imprisoned. Moreover, under every government without exception everything is kept back that might emancipate and everything encouraged that tends to corrupt the people, such as literary works tending to keep them in the barbarism of religious and patriotic superstition, all kinds of sensual amusements, spectacles, circuses, theaters, and even the physical means of inducing stupefaction, as tobacco and alcohol, which form the principal source of revenue of states. Even prostitution is encouraged, and not only recognized, but even organized by the government in the majority of states. So much for the third method.

The fourth method consists in selecting from all the men who have been stupefied and enslaved by the three former methods a certain number, exposing them to special and intensified means of stupefaction and brutalization, and so making them into a passive instrument for carrying out all the cruelties and brutalities needed by the government. This result is attained by taking them at the youthful age when men have not had time to form clear and definite principles of morals, and removing them from all natural and human conditions of life, home, family and kindred, and useful labor. They are shut up together in barracks, dressed in special clothes, and worked upon by cries, drums, music, and shining objects to go through certain daily actions invented for this purpose, and by this means are brought into an hypnotic condition in which they cease to be men and become mere senseless machines, submissive to the hypnotizer. These physically vigorous young men (in these days of universal conscription, all young men), hypnotized, armed with murderous weapons, always obedient to the governing authorities and ready for any act of violence at their command, constitute the fourth and principal method of enslaving men.

By this method the circle of violence is completed.

Intimidation, corruption, and hypnotizing bring people into a condition in which they are willing to be soldiers; the soldiers give the power of punishing and plundering them (and purchasing officials with the spoils), and hypnotizing them and converting them in time into these same soldiers again.

The circle is complete, and there is no chance of breaking through it by force.

Translated by Constance Garnett, 1894. The full text of the essay is available here: “The kingdom of god is within you”

Leo Tolstoy left his home 100 years ago. “War and Peace” and history

2010-11-11T21:54:00.008Z

When I started reading “War and Peace” one month ago, I didn't even remember about the upcoming hundredth anniversary of Tolstoy's death. Today, I finished reading it and it happens that this is the day when one hundred years ago (28 October Old Style, 10 November New Style), Leo Tolstoy left his home together with his personal doctor Makovitsky. Tolstoy planned to escape from the annoying life in the comfortable mansion and to spend his last years in poverty and honesty. The doctor didn't quite understand Tolstoy, he thought they are going to visit some family members and didn't take enough money. Tolstoy kissed his daughter, took the suitcase and they left. They took third class railway tickets and departed to Kozelsk. A lot of people smoked in the car and Tolstoy had to go outside for fresh air. He spent about 45 minutes outside and these three quarters of an hour were crucial. Ten days later Tolstoy died of pneumonia on the railway station Astapovo. So smoking killed one of the most famous Russian writers.

Well, the story of his life and death is more or less well known and you can read his biography in almost any language. I would like to talk today about his novel “War and Peace”. Tolstoy wrote later that the novel is fiction and that it may distort history to comply with the author's intentions. Indeed, there is a large number of inconsistencies, contradictions and anachronisms in the book. Let's have a look at some of them.

Do you know how the Russian text begins? Here's the first paragraph:

— Eh bien, mon prince. Gênes et Lueques ne sont plus que des apanages, des поместья, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous préviens que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j'y crois) — je ne vous connais plus, vous n'êtes plus mon ami, vous n'êtes plus мой верный раб, comme vous dites

This is the original Russian text, and I mean it :) Later in the novel, Tolstoy also mentions some noble whose patriotic feelings made him learn speaking Russian. Of course, Russian aristocrats of the 19th century usually spoke very good French, but Tolstoy is wrong here. In the first decade of the century, foreign-speaking aristocrats were rare. Those who lived in Russia, had to talk to their servants (and sometimes they spoke in a folksy manner for this reason). Only those who were born in abroad, spoke some foreign language sufficiently well. And this language was hardly ever French, because after the revolution of 1789 very few Russian aristocrats visited the lawless and rebellious France, they preferred Germany. Strange enough, but French became popular in the aristocratic salons after the Napoleonic wars, when children grew up who were raised in 1790s-1800s by French tutors, who fled from the revolution to Russia.

The family of Kuragins is painted by Tolstoy in a rather strange manner. Tolstoy dislikes them and his feelings are seen even in the names of the family members. So, the name Hippolyte is outstandingly unaristocratic. This name was typical for bourgeoisie, especially Polish. The title “prince Hippolyte” must have sounded absurd in 1805. His sister's name is Helene. Her name looks French, but it wasn't used among French nobility because of its foreign, Anglo-German sound. In Russia of the early 19th century, the name associated with Russified Germans. Just as often the name may be found in the form “Länchen”, purely German (the name of the wife of Faddey Bulgarin). The brother of Hippolyte and Helene has the name Anatole. The name is neutral, but extremely rare in all countries of that time.

The novel begins in the aristocratic salon of Anna Scherer, maid of honor of the Empress. Another one of Tolstoy's errors. You see, maid of honour was not just a title. She was a maid, she could not be married. And maids absolutely could not invite guests, except for close relatives, and only during the day. So, a salon of a maid would be a flagrant violation of the public norms.

Besides, in July 1805 the guests of Anna Scherer would be out of the city, all of them. The royal family with all the courtiers would leave St. Petersburg to the summer residence. Army officers (including, for example, Dolokhov) would be in the summer camps.

Anatole Kuragin asks princess Mary for her hand in marriage, but he was only twenty years old. It was too early for him to marry. Later, he tries to run away with Natasha Rostova, even though he knows he cannot marry her (he had been married by that time). He should have known that Natasha was not a plebeian gal, she was a lady and ladies were not that defenceless. Firstly, Natasha's brothers would have demanded satisfaction. Secondly, Rostovs were a noble family and could have complained to the emperor himself, and his rage would have been quick and merciless. So, prince S. Trubetskoy was deprived of his title and property and sent to the army as a mere soldier when he tried to run away with a married lady.

Helene Kuragin wanted to divorce Pierre Bezukhov so much that she converted to catholicism, writes Tolstoy. Well, actually, she didn't have to. She could have divorced without much problems, because of the long time they lived separately. It was a legitimate reason for divorce. On the other hand, in 1812 the number of conversions to catholicism, always very small, dropped to zero. The problem was that the order of Jesuits was disbanded by the Pope in 1773 and restored only in 1814. In the meanwhile, the Jesuits found a shelter in Russia and their situation was so unstable that they would not risk losing the favor of the emperor by proselytizing.

Tolstoy writes about Prince Andrew: “After the Austerlitz campaign Prince Andrew had firmly resolved not to continue his military service, and when the war recommenced and everybody had to serve, he took a post under his father in the recruitment so as to avoid active service.” It was hardly probably, since nobody could make a Russian aristocrat to serve unless he wanted to. This freedom was granted by the 1762 Manifesto of Peter III.

When Natasha Rostova visited her uncle, she danced in typical Russian manner, says Tolstoy: “Where, how, and when had this young countess, educated by an emigree French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit and obtained that manner which the pas de chale would, one would have supposed, long ago have effaced? But the spirit and the movements were those inimitable and unteachable Russian ones... She did the right thing with such precision, such complete precision, that Anisya Fedorovna, who had at once handed her the handkerchief she needed for the dance, had tears in her eyes, though she laughed as she watched this slim, graceful countess, reared in silks and velvets and so different from herself, who yet was able to understand all that was in Anisya and in Anisya's father and mother and aunt, and in every Russian man and woman.”

But Natasha spent a large part of her life in village and she had to have seen the village girls dancing and, of course, she knew the folk style of dancing.

Now, Pierre Bezukhov. When he first appeared in the book, “Anna Pavlovna greeted him with the nod she accorded to the lowest hierarchy in her drawing room”, because he was a bastard, but the bastards were not treated this way even in the highest society. So, another bastard, N. Novosiltsev, the base son of the sister of the Count Stroganov, was one of the “young friends” of the emperor Alexander.

In the age of ten, Pierre left Russia and spent another ten years abroad, and yet, unlike Hippolyte Kuragin, he speaks Russian very well.

Pierre's ties with the freemasons do not look very trustworthy. By that time the old-fashioned rituals of freemasons were already looked upon sarcastically, their Golden Age was in mid-18th century.

The funny thing with all these (and many other) anachronisms is that even when you are aware of them, the novel remains a masterpiece. You understand the characters better, the storyline becomes straight and clear. After all, Tolstoy is still a great writer, even though his Russian style looks so awkward that many Russian readers turn to hatred. So, one of very good science fiction writers, Svyatoslav Loginov, agnrily criticizes “War and Peace” for the last fifty pages, where Tolstoy explain his philosophy of history. I agree, these final pages are unbearable (and I never read them to the end). And yet, the book is great. The battle scenes are overwhelming, the plot is absorbing, the characters are vivid and the language is unmistakably Tolstoyesque: awkward but precise.

If you ask me, the best character in the book is Kutuzov, the master of zen war, who defeated Napoleon by escaping him. Oh, and the best reason to love “War and Peace” is not in the book. She is in the movie, and you know her name: Audrey Hepburn :).

This post is heavily based on the information borrowed from the article “Historical Context in Fiction: Aristocratic Society in the Novel ‘War and Peace’” by Ye. Tsimbayeva, published in the magazine «Вопросы литературы» 2004, №5. The full text is available here: “Исторический контекст в художественном образе (Дворянское общество в романе «Война и мир»)”

Report of Russian secret police on moral and political state in the country. 150 years ago, sorry

2010-10-31T14:29:00.006Z

Since 1827, The Third Section of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery produced special reports for the tsar, describing the moral and political situation in the Russian society. Four years ago, a large share of these reports was published by the Russian State Archive. Below are some short excerpts from the report summarizing the events of 1860, 150 years ago. Five years had passed since the coronation of Alexander II and only one year remained till the most important act of liberalism in Russia in 19th century (the last three words were, probably, not necessary).

Moral and political review of 1860

On revolutionary projects

For thirty years already, the aggregations of political emigrants in England, France, Belgium and Switzerland have constituted the source of all destructive projects in Europe. The revolutionary propaganda was led by Joseph Mazzini, the tireless advocate of the Italian freedom and the universal republic, in which this dreamer sees the future of the humanity...

The bombs, thrown in 1858 in Paris by Orsini, have proven the extreme danger of the ideas of the emancipation of Italy for the French throne...

Politicians see in the preparations for the popular resistance certain signs of the upcoming merge of the Italian question with the Hungarian, Polish and the Eastern questions. The future may confirm this guess, but it is already clearly seen that the tools chosen for these plans prove their revolutionary and democratic nature.

On Polish expatriates

The Polish emigrants include the expatriates of 1832 and 1848. The former, due to their number and influence, are more important than the latter, who mostly left Poland in young age, because of their inclination to life of leisure, without strict political principles...

According to the directions given in the speech [by Adam Czartoryski], instructions were sent to the Poles in the Tsardom to do nothing till the liberation of peasants [...] but that they should make the Polish peasants believe that the Polish aristocrats forced the Tsar to liberate them.

In the meanwhile, the hopes of the Polish emigrants in Paris and in London are based on the events being prepared in Hungary. They plan that either the rebellion in Hungary in which Poles would participate may become useful for their own rebellion, or that the Hungary, reformed by Austria, will provide them with the moral grounds to demand the reformation of Poland.

On Russian expatriates

In 1860, the number of Russians who left their Fatherland and explicitly joined the opposition, has grown. Some of the most important of them are: 1) Prince Peter Dolgorukov, the author of the book titled "La Verite sur la Russie". Having published the book in Paris, he departed to London, making acquaintance with Herzen and Ogarev. As far as we know, his book was recognized abroad as malicious vilification of the all Russian state and the ruling Dynasty and damaged his reputation among people of reason...

2) Prince Yuri Golitsyn, who fled from Russia due to the being justly punished for the improper correspondence withe Herzen. Because of his narrow-mindedness, he could not succeed in literature and has to earn his living by giving concerts in London and other cities...

3) Someone Kisleyev or Kisteltsev, young man in the age of 28, who calls himself doctor of medicine, while others think he is a clergyman... On 17 [29] November, on the day of anniversary of Polish revolution, Kisleyev was present on the meeting and spoke in favor of revolution.

4) Hierodeacon Agapy, who broke with the archimandrite and fled to London.

All mentioned above have joined the circle of Herzen and Ogarev, who continue their maleficent publications. According to secret information, there are other Russian citizens who did not proclaim their animosity towards the legitimate government but do participate in revolutionary projects. So, it is known that two Russians, retired officer Dietmars and retired state official Mechnikov, fought in the army of Garibaldi.

Poznan

The constitutional rights of the Great Duchy of Poznan give their citizens right to advocate patriotic feelings in public, while promoting hatred to all things German... The government views it forbearingly, as if being afraid of decisive measures. While the Poznan Poles made no rebellious actions in this year, they took every opportunity to prepare the population for such rebellions. Their main weapon in this year was the accusation of police by deputy Niegolewski (probably, Władysław Niegolewski. DM), who suggested that the police was responsible for the sending of fake proclamations, putting Poles on political actions... On the other hand, the demands to allow usage of Polish language in courts never stopped. There were occasions when the prisoners refused to reply in German, pretending they do not understand.

Galicia

The patriotic sentiments were strongest among university students in Krakow, who demanded the lectures in Polish to be allowed by sending the deputy to Vienna, who beat the education inspector who tried to keep them inside the university to prevent demonstrations, who sang the songs from the 1830 rebellion during morning walks and often met in on of the city caffees. An anonymous letter was received, reporting that the students formed a secret society during these meetings. Investigations are underway. Among the people involved in the society, the most important seems to be the retired lieutenant of the Russian army Narcyz Jankowski (Link in Polish. DM) who was mentioned in the letter. In September, Jankowski was arrested on the border and delivered to Krakow.

Lieutenant Jankowski, son of a landlord from Kiev region, retired in 1857. For 3 years he lived in Warsaw, making acquaintances and hosting meetings with public book readings. During the arrest, Jankowski managed to destroy some papers. Among the papers found in his apartment were draft program of a Polish democratic committee in Paris, instruction to the secret societies to begin armed rebellion all over Poland and a note saying that 100 brochures of "Przeglad rzeczy polskich" were given to him to deliver to Warsaw

...

In December, a Polish review printed in Paris (Przeglad rzeczy polskich) published and article, where the author mentions the May demonstration in Krakow university and states that the Polish autonomy will be attained by the youth, and offers the younger readers to deepen their patriotic feelings, even though they have already been reproved by many older Polish authoritative thinkers.

Emissaries

The governor of the Polish Kingdom has reported that the Poznan police informed him of the arrival of a Polish emissary Lisecki to the Great Duchy of Poznan. He distributed inciting brochures and pretended he was sent by Miroslawski to investigate the chances of beginning a mutiny in Poznan or in Poland... From a letter sent on February 14 from Paris, it is known that the real name of Lisecki, a.k.a. Gnatowski, was Arthur Trok.

The Polish Kingdom

According to the news from the Kingdom, the Poles there sympathize the events in Sicily and Naples, the national movement in Hungary and Galicia, but remain calm, while awaiting for advantageous changes in the politics. In the meanwhile, they chose to assist the growth of the nation: enhancing the morality of the lower classes by fighting alcoholism and by attracting them to the churches; establishment of municipal banks to liberate the agriculture, especially from the destructive influence of the Jews and to enhance the arable farming. The primary instrument for this was the Farming society, established in 1859, which has grown immensely and established contacts with similar societies in Poznan and Galicia. Very soon the Farmin society started showin signs of maleficent for the monarchy political influence in the Polish Kingdom. So, it deemed necessary to close the provincial departments of the society, preserving the central department in Warsaw. This measure, though, produced dissatisfaction among Poles.

Western districts

(This chapter also described the unrest among Poles in other regions of Russia, including Vilno (modern Vilnius) and Kiev. DM).

Finland

In Finland, a secret society was formed of the people, who write for Swedish newspapers articles hostile to Russia, trying to incite Finns against her rule, especially the younger Finns, among whom destructive ideas were found in the Helsingfors University. These feelings were noted by Swedish politicians who find them useful for their goals. In the end of 1859 Dahlfeld was appointed the Swedish consul in Helsingfors. He made acquaintances among lesser writers, who are his instrument to spread ideas hostile to Russia. British and American consuls cooperated.

On state reforms

In 1860, just like in the previous three years, the most important matter of the Russian politics was the liberation of landlord-owned peasants from serfdom. It was expected that the question will be solved by the end of 1860, but in spite of the efforts of the government, it was impossible... Nobody, though, could underestimate the high moral and political goal represented by the liberation. The full freedom in the discussion, allowed by Your Majesty, helped the detailed investigation of all possibilities. Measures were taken to mitigate unrest when the decrees of Your Majesty were being published, and the measures gave positive results.

In the Baltic regions, where the aristocracy has exclusive rights to own the land they were afraid that their privileges may be violated during the liberation of peasants and that the peasants will have equal rights during the elections.

A part of peasants in the Baltic regions (mostly in Lifland and Estland) expressed their desire to move to new lands in Samara region. In spite of the resistance of some landlords, 400 peasants have moved.

In Crimea, a large number of Crimean Tatars have moved to Turkey this year. This resettlement threatens the landowners of the Crimean peninsula who might not have enough workers to continue cultivating their land. The aristocrats of Crimea gathered in Simpheropol to discuss possible replacement for the lost workforce and the introduction of new machines.

Together with the government's intentions to alleviate the life of peasants, certain private efforts took place in 1860. Mostly, by establishment of sunday schools and temperance associations.

Unnaturally fast growth of temperance associations in 1859 was explained by the rage of the lower classes against liquor stores owners. As soon as measures were taken to prevent violent actions, the growth stopped.

Sunday schools are getting extremely popular and the local education authorities are instructed to pay special attention to prevent dissemination of harmful teachings.

On administration

All credit institutions have been merged in one State Bank. It is too soon to make any conclusion on the effect of this measure, but the first impression of the merchants was that the activity of the new bank is limited by the responsibility and insufficient capital.

On the internal political state of the Empire

To conclude the report, we have to note that the spirit of the people of the Empire strives for the growth of the civil rights on modern liberal ground. These views are expressed in magazines, where, in spite of the efforts of the censorship, very often too liberal and even dangerous views are found. The liberal journalism incites the intellectual ferment and helps the illegally imported revolutionary magazines, directed against the existing state and monarchy. What is true for other countries, should be true for Russia: the unrestrained freedom of press is the greatest danger for the existing state, but the press can also be the best instrument in the hands of the government.

Besides the love towards liberal establishments, the dreams of restoration of independency of separate nations have also made their way into Russia. These dreams are insecure for the multinational Russian Empire. They can be observed not only in the Western districts, but also in Little Russia and Finland. The modern politics of the West gives more grounds to these dreams, especially to those of Poles, whose loyalty even earlier was doubtful.

Adjutant-general Dolgorukov

March 22, 1861

130th birthday of Alexander Railway Bridge

2010-10-24T18:34:00.004Z

The Alexander Railway Bridge was opened on August 30, 1880. ~~In the end of 19th century~~By that time, it was the longest bridge in Europe, 1436 meters. It was also the last large bridge in Russia built from imported iron. Newspapers compared it to the Suez channel. The importance of the bridge was that it was the point of connection of the railroads from Moscow and Western Russia and the railroads of Urals and Siberia, including the Trans-Siberian Railway.

In 1918, two spans were exploded by retiring troops. After the revolution the bridge was renamed to Syzran Bridge, after a nearby city.

I cross Volga along this bridge every year and, I have to admit, every time I feel a bit scared: it's so long and thin and you see the running water below :)

Here you can find some old photographs of the Alexander Bridge: Gallery of Syzran. In 2004, the bridge was reconstructed and now it looks differently: Bridge reconstruction. And I like this photo.

Protests of African students in Moscow, 1963

2010-09-03T11:10:00.005Z

On December 18, 2007, I wrote about the march organized by African students in Moscow in 1963 as a protest against the murder of a student from Ghana. One of our readers, Mark Thorpe, wrote to me saying that he had found an old issue of Green Bay Press-Gazette (Wednesday evening, Decenber 18, 1963, number 172, published in Green Bay, WI) with an article about these events. Mark has kindly scanned and sent this article to me, and now you can read it below.

African Students Storm Kremlin in Racial Riot

Med Student’s Knifing Death Causes Protest

by Preston Grover MOSCOW (AP) — Several hundred students from Ghana and other African nations stormed into Red Square today right under Premier Khrushchev’s office windows, fought with police and tried to break into the Kremlin. The students said they were protesting the fatal stabbing of a student from Ghana by a Russian last Friday. The Africans broke past barricades into Red Square, where Russians march on May Day and on the anniversary of the October Revolution. But the scene was more reminiscent of the wild days of the revolution in 1917.

‘Moscow Like Alabama’

The students bore a sign showing a knife plunged into the head of an African. Another sigh declared: “Friend today, the devil tomorrow.” “Moscow is a second Alabama,” shouted one student. The students fought police all the way to the Red Square from the Ghanian Embassy a mile away where they first gathered. They stormed over a barricade of Soviet trucks at the entrance to Red Square, fighting police on top of the trucks and underneath. The big gates of Spasky Tower, the main entrance from the Kremlin into Red Square, banged shut as students rolled over police opposition and tried to get into the Kremlin.

Past Khrushchev’s Office

They stormed past the office of Khrushchev. They were separated from his office by the big red brick wall of the Kremlin. Whether he was inside his office was not known. Inside the Kremlin, the Soviet Parliament was meeting, discussing the new budget. Police apparently at no time used their guns to control the students. Instead they wheeled out loudspeakers appealing for them to go home. “Red Square is closed,” one of the sound trucks blared out. But the students payed no attention. Shortly after 2 p.m., crowds of shoppers who had swarmed into the square were ordered out along with foreign correspondents.

Riot Attracts Curious

People continued to pile into adjoining streets, never having seen an angry demonstration of foreigners against Russians. The students remained in the square for a time and were reinforced later by some 200 more who came, apparently carrying a message of protest. They made their way to Spasky Gate, where a Kremlin official came out and said a delegation of 10 would be received by the Ministry of Higher Education. A group of the demonstrators then headed for the ministry with their petition of complaint. By 3 p.m., Red Square had been cleared. The barricades were withdrawn and the demonstration was over. It was the first such demonstration by foreign students here directed at the Russians. Ghanian students demonstrated last February in Communist Bulgaria, claiming racial persecution.

Medical Student Killed

Thousands of African students are studying in Communist schools, many of them with all expenses paid. The dead man was identified as Asare Addo, who was studying medicine at Kalinin 100 miles northwest of Moscow. He was said to have been killed Friday. Some students said Soviet officials issued a statement blaming the death on natural causes, but the Africans disputed this. Emerging from a conference in the Kremlin, some of the students said Education Minister Vyacheslav Yelutin denied that the student, Asare Addo, was stabbed. They said Yelutin told them Addo was drunk, had fallen down in the street, and died of cold. The minister told a full investigation had been ordered. Several students who were at the conference told reporters they did not believe this report. They said they were informed that Addo wanted to marry a Russian girl and was killed by a Russian man who was opposed to the marriage. Students said they prepared for today’s demonstration by sending telegrams to Ghanian students in Odessa, Kharkov and other university towns, asking them to come to Moscow. Each was given a red head band, a sign of mourning in Ghana. At the outset, the protest was orderly. When it became apparent that the students planned to carry their protest through the streets, police reinforcements were rushed in. Some rocked a police car, threatening to overturn it. Others forced their way between and under the trucks blocking the entrance of Red Square.

What Stalin said about Hiroshima

2010-08-17T04:50:00.003Z

The text below is taken from the record of the meeting of Stalin and W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to the USSR. Full declassified document is available here. The text was published in Russian by Sergey Oboguev in his blog. Thanks to Sergey for the interesting find.

Conversation. 8:20, Moscow, August 8, 1945.
TOP SECRET
Present: W. A. Harriman, American Ambassador

        George F. Kennan, Minister Counselor

        Generalissimus Stalin

        V. M. Molotov, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs

        Mr. Pavlov, Soviet interpreter

...

The Ambassador asked what he thought of the effects of the news of the atomic bomb would have on the Japanese.

The Generalissimus replied that he thought the Japanese were at present looking for a pretext to replace the present government with one which would be qualified to undertake a surrender. The atomic bomb might give them this pretext.

The Ambassador observed that it was a good thing we had invented this and not the Germans. For long, he said, no one had dared think it would be a success. It was only a few days before the President had told Stalin about it in Berlin that we had learned definitely that it would work succesfully.

The Generalissimus replied that Soviet scientists said that it was a very difficult problem to work out.

The Ambassador said that if the Allies could keep it and apply it for peaceful purposes it would be a great thing.

The Generalissimus agreed and said that would mean the end of the war and aggressors. But the secret would have to be well kept.

The Ambassador said that it could have great importance for peaceful purposes.

The Generalissimus replied, "unquestionably". He added that Soviet scientists had also tried to do it but had not succeeded. They had found one laboratory in Germany where the Germans had evidently been working on the same problem but Russians could not find that they had come to any results. If they had found it, Hitler would never have surrendered. England, too, had gotten nowhere with these researches although they had excellent physicists.

The Ambassador explained that the English had pooled their knowledge with us since 1941. But it had taken enormous installations to conduct the experiments and to achieve final results.

The Generalissimus remarked that this had been very expensive.

...

Photos from early Soviet years

2010-01-07T22:16:00.004Z

Recently, I stumbled upon a web-site on the art of photography, some pages of which were devoted to the classic photographers. The web-site features a large collection of shots made by these photographers in 1920s, 1930s and later. Lots of magnificent pictures and scenes from daily life. Here are some of those photographers and their web-pages (the text is in Russian, but never mind, the collections are title like "1924-1929", so you won't get lost):

Alexander Rodchenko, the author of that famous portrait of Lilya Brik at the top of this post. Rodchenko was a good friend of Lilya and Osip Briks and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Maxim Dmitriev, one of the earliest enthusiasts of photography
Boris Ignatovich
Yevgeny Khaldey
Ivan Shagin
Arkady Shaykhet

I found this web-site when I was looking for photos of the Russian/Soviet silent movie stars. While searching, I found another web-site called "Silent Cinema Actors". The author has also made separate web-sites for the "brightest" stars of that era, like Vera Kholodnaya.

1908 video: Winter in Moscow

2010-01-04T18:13:00.003Z

I thought it might be a good New Year's gift to the readers :)

Upcoming anniversary

2009-03-20T13:29:00.002Z

On April 1, Nikolay Gogol will be 200. Unknown fans recently launched the web-site Gogol200.ru. It's in Russian, but you can view a huge collection of illustrations to Gogol's books. Explore them, while I'm away on business trip till next Friday :).

I have to warn that the web-site is built in Macromedia Flash and it may be very uncomfortable.

Stratfor report

2009-03-19T12:41:00.004Z

These guys dig Russia. Or so it seems at the first glance.

The Financial Crisis and the Six Pillars of Russian Strength.

I've always been a bit skeptical about all those "objective" circumstances which supposedly define political, economical and cultural life of a country. Otherwise, the analysis is interesting.

While Russia’s financial sector may be getting torn apart, the state does not really count on that sector for domestic cohesion or stability, or for projecting power abroad. Russia knows it lacks a good track record financially, so it depends on — and has shored up where it can — six other pillars to maintain its (self-proclaimed) place as a major international player. The current financial crisis would crush the last five pillars for any other state, but in Russia, it has only served to strengthen these bases. Over the past few years, there was a certain window of opportunity for Russia to resurge while Washington was preoccupied with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This window has been kept open longer by the West’s lack of worry over the Russian resurgence given the financial crisis. But others closer to the Russian border understand that Moscow has many tools more potent than finance with which to continue reasserting itself.

March 11 in Russian history. Armed neutrality. Barsov's grammar

2009-03-11T10:40:00.005Z

1780

(28 February Old Style)

In 1775, when British colonies in America began their war for independence, France and Spain supported the separatists and Great Britain had to look for allies. In June 1775, King George III asked Russian empress Catherine the Great to send troops to America to suppress the rebellion. For Russia, free trade was way more important than the alliance with the old rival, who attempted to blockade Spanish and French ports. American privateers also interfered with Russian-English sea trade, but the losses they caused were tiny compared with the consequences of the British blockade. Catherine II refused to join the war against American separatists. Instead, in 1780, she launched an international campaign for free maritime trade. From Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy:

[Empress Catherine II of Russia] under pressure from Great Britain on the one hand to enter an alliance and from the northern powers on the other to help protect their neutrality, found her own shipping becoming more subject to interference from the belligerents. The result was the declaration of 1780, identifying the principles by which Catherine proposed to act and the means—commissioning a substantial portion of her fleet to go "wherever honour, interest, and necessity compelled"—by which she proposed to enforce those principles. Broadly, these principles were that neutral shipping might navigate freely from port to port and on the coasts of nations at war; that the property of subjects of belligerent states on neutral ships should be free except when it was classed as contraband within the meaning of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1766; and that a port was assumed to be blockaded only when the attacking power had rendered its ships stationary and made entry a clear danger.

(read more)

More about the League of Armed Neutrality from the POV of Russian history in The History of Russian Navy:

Although the Declaration was enforced for only three years, it was, nonetheless, an original doctrine of major significance. It contributed to the understanding among nations of the inviolability of peaceful merchant vessels, their right to be free from the threat of piracy and harassment, and that wanton disregard of such rights would not be tolerated by Russia and its allies. Enforcement of the Declaration by the Russian Navy confirmed that a powerful naval fleet commanded international respect and that Russia had become a maritime power that was able to support its policies and punish offenders. In effect, the Declaration of Armed Neutrality served to elevate the reputation of the Russian Navy. The Baltic Fleet gradually strengthened. As early as 1777 Admiral Greig had suggested a new table of ship's proportions and the refurbishing of ship armaments. The 54-gun vessels vanished from use, replaced by more powerful ones; 66- and 74-gun vessels with larger-calibre cannon became the base of the fleet. The strength of the Baltic Fleet was additionally reinforced by eight 100-gun, three-decked ships of the line, the first of which was the handsome Rostislav. In the year 1784 the Rostislav's dimensions were impressive-55 metres in length and a displacement of 3,500 tons. The next ships to be built were the Saratov, the Three Saints and the Saint Ioann Chrestitel, which proved their worth against the best-equipped vessels in the British and Swedish fleets.

In 1761 the weaponry of the Russian fleet was updated. More powerful shell-firing guns were installed on the lower decks, and in 1788 effective short-range cannon (carronades) were placed on the quarterdeck and forecastle of larger vessels. New copper sheathing protected ships' hulls and increased their speed. The fleet was regularly provided with officers from the Naval Cadet Corps (Naval Academy), which graduated a hundred such officers annually.

Inasmuch as war against Sweden loomed on the horizon, Russia was well-advised to refurbish its Baltic Fleet. The Swedes were hesitant to concede their dominant position in the Baltic to Russia. Friedrick Chapman, considered one of the foremost shipwrights of his day, was commissioned by Sweden to build 64-gun ships of the line and 40-gun frigates with heavy 24- and 36-pound artillery on the lower-deck batteries. In addition, the Swedish rowing fleet was reinforced by well-armed smaller vessels-hemmems, turums, udems and light, maneuverable gun-boats. The King of Sweden, Gustav III, awaited an excuse to begin hostilities against Russia.

Encyclopedia of Russian History adds an interesting conclusion to the article about the League of Armed Neutrality:

The league was remembered in the United States, somewhat erroneously, as a mark of Russian friendship and sympathy, and bolstered Anglophobia in the two countries. More generally, it affirmed a cardinal principle of maritime law that continues in effect in the early twenty-first century. Indirectly, it also led to a considerable expansion of Russian-American trade from the 1780s through the first half of the nineteenth century.

1783

The Commission of Peoples Schools entrusted Anton Barsov, professor of the Moscow University, with the task of writing a course of Russian grammar.

Among earlier works of Barsov were a chronology of Russian history, "Collection of 4291 Ancient Russian proverb", translations of French, Greek and Latin works on politics and philology, including "Cellarii Orthographia Latina", a method of Russia stenography "De Brachygraphia" and other works. He participated in the writing of the dictionary of Russian language. He finished work on the first volume of the dictionary when the new job made him to send all materials he had collected for the dictionary to the Academy and concentrate on the grammar course.

He was writing the course since 1783 till 1788, but the Commission of Peoples Schools decided not to publish it. It was lost and we can only use incomplete copies. Members of the Commission concluded that the course was overloaded with details and unsuitable for schools. Another possible cause was, probably, Barsov's ideas about the reform of the orthography. Some of those proposals were implemented in the 20th century, during the 1918 reform. So, he proposed to eliminate the hard sign "ъ" at the ultimate position after consonants, to exclude redundant letters "θ" and "И", in favor of their duplicates "Ф" and "I", correspondingly, and to replace "ъ" with an apostroph or the soft sign "ь" in the middle of words. He also offered to introduce a new ligature, "io", to denote the sound for which Karamzin later invented a new letter "ё", which is stil used in Russian alphabet.

His grammar was not published at that time, but now it is still in print, both in Russian and in English. Moreover, you can download the full text in Russian (1981 edition) as a PDF file for free (23.2Mb).

From the preface to The Comprehensive Russian Grammar of A.A.Barsov by Lawrence W. Newman:

This volume contains the first publication of the Comprehensive Russian Grammar of Anton Barsov (1730-1791). Written between 1783 and 1788 for use in schools, it would have needed to be shortened and simplified to fulfill its original purpose. Its publication helps fill an important lacuna in the history of the Russian grammatical tradition, as well as providing new information about eighteenth-century Russian. Barsov was professor of rhetoric at Moscow University for thirty years, including the period when he was writing the grammar. The influence of his university work was apparently great, to judge, for example, from Karamzin's testimony (cited here from V.V. Vinogradov, Iz istorii izučenija russkogo sintaksisa, Moscow: Moscow University, 1958, page 49): if, says Karamzin, he "knows how sometimes to pause over a word, how to be cautious, then he owes this advantage to this one extremely learned man." It is likely that the grammar, or at least lectures from which it was derived, was not completely lost, but played a minor role in the education of a generation of Russian intellectuals.

March 10 in Russian history. Stoletov's research of photoelectric effect

2009-03-10T10:47:00.006Z

1888

(26 February Old Style)

The experiment set by Alexander Stoletov is finally successful. The photoelectric effect was first observed in 1839 by Becquerel, but its discovery is usually attributed to Heinrich Hertz. Stoletov, though, was the first who deduced the laws and patterns of this effect.

Here's a little biography of Stoletov taken from Russia-InfoCentre:

Born: August 10, 1839

Deceased: May 27, 1896

Eminent Russian physicist, Alexander Stoletov, was born to the family of a merchant in 1839. Alexander’s father owned a grocery shop and his mother, a well-educated woman, did her best to teach her children Russian language and arithmetic before they started attending a secondary school. Alexander was four when he learned to read and he spent days reading, since his health wasn’t very good.

In 1849 Alexander entered the gymnasium in Vladimir. He graduated it seven years after with a diploma of honours and gold medal for outstanding achievements in learning. Same year Alexander Stoletov was enrolled to the faculty of physics and mathematics of Moscow State University and received educational scholarship from the state.

In 1860 Alexander finished the university and passed master’s examination. However, master thesis defense had to be postponed, because Alexander Stoletov went to Europe for new knowledge. He spent three years in Berlin, Heidelberg and Gottingen, studying physics, and fascinated physicists with his talent. (He studied at Gustav Kirchhoff, who called Stoletov "his most gifted student" DM)

First scientific research Alexander Stoletov performed abroad. Young scientist found out that dielectric properties of water had no effect on electromagnetic interaction of conductors. In 1865 Stoletov returned to Russia and soon got a position of a teacher of mathematical physics and physical geography in Moscow State University. Physicist read brilliant lectures and prepared his master thesis, "The General Problem of Electrostatics and Its Reduction to the Simplest Form". Young scientist solved this problem and defended his master thesis in 1869. Following years were spent in effort to create his own physical laboratory – Moscow State University had no experimental facilities, and scientists had to go abroad to perform research. In 1871 Alexander Stoletov started working on his doctor dissertation and studied magnetic properties of iron. Creating a theory of how electric machines worked was an important task, since there was no such science as “electro-techniques”. Stoletov again went to Germany, where he discovered some important patterns in the magnetism of iron.

In 1872 Alexander Stoletov successfully defended his doctor dissertation, and the following year brought him a position of professor in Moscow University. Same year his physical laboratory finally opened – Russian scientists didn’t need to go abroad to perform experiments anymore. The physicist read popular lectures, wrote popular scientific papers and supervised a physical society. After defense of doctor dissertation Alexander Stoletov became a world-known scientist – he visited opening ceremony of physical laboratory in Cambridge in 1874, and represented Russian science at I World Congress of Electricity in Paris in 1881, where he reported on proportion factors between electrostatic and electromagnetic units of measure. Stoletov suggested using Ohm for electric resistance. In 1888 Alexander Stoletov started studies of photo effect, which was discovered by Hertz the year before. Elegant experiments resulted in a discovery of the law linking critical pressure, electromotive force of a battery and distance between the electrode and the net. Later this constant was named after him.

In 1893, three Academy members recommended Stoletov for becoming a member of the Academy of Sciences. However, the President of the Academy, Great Prince Konstantin, refused to sign necessary papers explaining himself with the “unbearable temper of Alexander Stoletov”. Such decision was a hard blow for the physicist, and many scientists sympathized with him due to that unfair situation. Health of the great scientist was weak since his early childhood, and in May 1896 Alexander Stoletov died of pneumonia.

Some other important works of Stoletov include:

On the Kohlrausch's measurement of the mercury unit of electric resistance;
Sur une méthode pour déterminer le rapport des unités électromagnétiques et électrostatiques;
On the electricity of juxtaposition;
On the critical state of bodies (4 articles);
Actino-electric research;
Ether and electricity;
Essay on the development of our knowledge of gases;
Introduction into acoustics and optics.

Some Stoletov's achievements:

Stoletov was the first to show that with the increase of the magnetic field the magnetic susceptibility of iron grows, but then begins to decrease.
He built the curve of the magnetic permeability of ferromagnetics, known as the Stoletov's curve.
Developed two new methods of measurement of magnetic properties of various materials.
He calculated the the proportion between electrodynamic and electrostatic units, producing a value very close to the speed of light.
Studied the outer photoelectric effect, discovered by Hertz.
Built the first solar cell based on the outer photoelectric effect and estimated the response time of the photoelectric current.
Discovered the direct proportionality of the intensity of light and the current caused by it (Stoletov's law)
Discovered the decrease of the solar cell's sensitivity with time (fatigue of solar cells).
Developed quantitative methods of the study of the photoelectric effect.
Discovered the Stoletov's constant (defines the ratio between the intensity of the electric current and the gas pressure under the maximum current).

The World War That Never Happened: US Occupies USSR

2009-03-10T06:28:00.005Z

A little follow-up to the yesterday's article which mentioned two US plans of nuclear attacks on the USSR. Earlier this year the amazing Strange Maps blog published this article: The World War That Never Happened: US Occupies USSR:

On 27 October 1951, the US magazine Collier’s devoted an entire 130-page issue to the theme of “Russia’s Defeat and Occupation, 1952-1960; Preview of the War We Do Not Want.” The cover showed an American soldier in a helmet emblazoned with US and UN insignia, reading MP (Military Police) Occupation Forces.
...
In the introduction, Collier’s proclaimed that it had chosen this theme: “To warn the evil masters of the Russian people that their conspiracy to enslave humanity is the dark, downhill road to World War III; to sound a powerful call for reason and understanding between the peoples of East and West — before it’s too late; to demonstrate that if the war we do not want is forced upon us, we will win.”

Another recent article at Strange Maps is here: World War II: If Maps Could Fight. Have a look at this funny story :).

Two dates from space age

2009-03-09T13:58:00.005Z

Today, Yuri Gagarin would be 75...

And two days ago Dmitry Kozlov, the designer of the carrier Vostok, that took Gagarin into space, has died in Samara.

Dmitry Ilyich Kozlov was born in 1919. In 1937 he entered the Leningrad military mechanical university. In 1941 he volunteered to join the Soviet army and fought near Leningrad. When in winter truck convoys began crossing the frozen Ladoga lake to bring food to the blockaded city, Kozlov was to guard one of the first trucks. Because of the wind he lost his cap, he jumped out of the car, and when he found it, the truck was hit by German shells and went under the ice. Kozlov survived, and in 1944 he was discharged after the explosion of a Finnish mine tore away his left hand.

in 1946 he was sent to Germany to research the remains of German V-2 missiles. Upon his return he was appointed the chief of the 3rd department of the NII-88 (scientific research institute 88), and began designing intercontinental ballistic missiles. He worked together with Sergey Korolyov, the demi-god of the Soviet space program. Korolyov developed the ballistic missile code-named R-7 and in 1958, when a new missile factory was started in Kuibyshev (Samara), Kozlov became the chief designer. "Only a beautiful rocket is a good rocket", he used to say. R-7 was the rocket that made the plans of mass strikes on the USSR, like Operation Dropshot or Plan Totality, totally useless.

The R-7 began its life as an ICBM, but it had a huge potential and most Soviet space carriers, including Vostok, Voskhod, Molniya and Soyuz (which means also the Chines Shenzhou) were heavily based on this Korolyov's project. Since 1964 the factory led by Kozlov became the leading organization of the Soviet space industry.

The same factory, now known as TsSKB-Progress (literally Central Specialized Design Bureau), designed and built a huge number of Soviet satellites, military and intelligence, and civil Fram, Resurs-F1, Resurs-F2, Bion and Yantar. Yantar was able to produce the images of extremely high quality, and for some years NASA purchased the films made by Yantar from the USSR. A commercial modification Resurs-DK was named after Dmitry Kozlov.

Actually, not a single company in the world can compete with TsSKB-Progress. 1740 successful launches. More than 870 successful re-entries and langings.

In 2005, Kozlov was awarded with the Gold Space Medal by FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale):

Mr Dmitry I. Kozlov - Designer General of the State Research and Production Space Rocket Centre TsSKB "Progress", was a close colleague of Sergei P. Korolev. In the late 1950s, he played a decisive role in establishing the Central Specialized Design Bureau, one of the leading developers of space rocket technology, which under his supervision produced eight types of space systems, including "Soyuz-FG", "Molniya-M", "Soyuz-U", "Soyuz-2", in addition to many types of unmanned spacecraft for various purposes. Mr Dmitry I. Kozlov paved the way for international cooperation in space exploration, having produced highly reliable manned and unmanned spacecraft ("Soyuz" and "Progress"), thus ensuring the operation of the International Space Station. For his great contribution to the design, production and operation of many types of unmanned and manned spacecraft, and for the organization and development of fruitful international cooperation in space exploration, Mr Dmitry I. Kozlov is a deserving recipient of the FAI Gold Space Medal for 2005.

March 6 in Russian history. Without Stalin? Hurrah!

2009-03-06T17:38:00.005Z

1953

Changes in the Soviet government. G. Malenkov became the prime-minister. K. Voroshilov was appointed the chairman of Supreme Soviet. L. Beriya, whose name would be remembered for a very long time since then, became the minister of home affairs. This decision was taken one day before, forty minutes before Stalin's death.

Death of almost every dictator causes problems. With Stalin, it was a special case. For thirty years, he was the man who held in his hands the life of every Soviet citizen. Children grew up who were taught that Stalin is the pillar of the freedom of the working class all over the world, that he, with his godlike intelligence, foresees all problems and that using and developing the only true teaching of Marx and Lenin he steers forward, to the victory of communism in all the world. And so on, so on, so on.

On the other hand, they knew of the Black Marias that came at night. Many of them knew people who were sent to Gulag. But in spite of this, what they felt when they learned of the death of Stalin was not pure happiness.

I remember the death of Brezhnev, who ruled the USSR for less than twenty years. I grew up with him. He was always somewhere around: on TV, in newspapers, on radio. My feelings were mixed. I hoped for something new, for changes, but I was scared. I'm absolultely sure that the same sentiments prevailed among the Soviet people fifty six years ago.

Some of them expressed these feelings openly. The whistleblowers had a lot of work then. Below are some stories taken from their denunciations.

Unemployed F.Kosaurihin from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, being drunk, said that it was Zhukov, not Stalin, who won the war. He swore at Stalin and scanned anti-Sovet verses, while standing at a liquor store.

G.Briakhne, a carpenter from Tiraspol, came at work on 6 March singing a song. When the workers told him it was a day of mourning and he should not sing, he cursed and said that another chief will come to the place of the old one.

V.Lutsevich, a woman from Ashkhabad region, being drunk, said about Stalin's death that "it serves him right".

V.Sokolova, an old school teacher from Gorky region, retold the programs of Voice of America to other teachers, saying that Stalin was poisoned by his doctor. Besides, she was accused of "distorting the Soviet reality", when she said during a lesson in March 1952 that in 1928, during the construction of the paper mill, tools and engineers were brought from America.

S.Vasilyev, a railroad worker from Murmansk region, when he learned of Stalin's death, came to the foreman and said: "The chief has died. Now, we'll be free, and the kolkhozes will be disbanded and the land will be given to the peasants". On the 9 March, during the Stalin's funerals, he would joke with the girls standing nearby.

A.Ivanov, movie technician from Charjou in Turkmenista, being drunk, cried "For Stalin's death, hurrah!" during a show, when Stalin's face appeared on screen.

Prisoner B.Ustin said to the workers who were fastening Stalin's portrait on a wall on 6 March: "What the %^&$ you are hanging here..." Earlier, in 1952, he said that Stalin stole Lenin's works, that the country is not managed properly, that we need a war which was not finished in 1945 because of Stalin, that we have to finish with America, so our children would live in peace.

G.Nastasyuk, a kolkhoz worker from Moldavia, said on 6 March: "It would be great if not only Stalin, but all communists died in three days. Than there would be no kolkhozes". Earlier, he was reported to say that the kolkhoz workers are paupers, that in spring there'll be a war with America and the Soviet power will fall.

I don't know what happened to these people, but there's one more story. 18-years old Larisa Ogorinskaya, a schoolgirl from Lvov in Ukraine, during the mourning meeting said: "He deserved it!". She was beaten by her schoolmates, Gukov and Gladkih, right on spot. Later, for this note she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Fortunately, very soon, on 17 June 1953, she was rehabilitated.

Boris Basov, medical worker from Kranoyarsk, being drunk, said in a pub: "Let him die, tens of other people can take his place". When someone else said: "These people won't be like him. Millions will mourn him", Basov replied: "Millions will celebrate his death!" He was detained and brought to police. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but in April the sentence was changed to five years. Quite soon he was rehabilitated.

A little more on the 1991 referendum on preservation of the USSR

2009-03-05T06:27:00.003Z

On 25 December I wrote about the 1991 referendum on the preservation of the Soviet Union, where 76.43% of all citizens chose to keep the Union "as a modernized federation of equal sovereign republics, where the rights and freedoms of the people of all nationalities would be guaranteed". Some days ago one of the readers asked me what was the breakup by republics. I tried to post the table in the comments, but it turns out that Blogger.com does not support tables in comments, so I post it as a separate article.

Strangely enough, I couldn't find the referendum results in English. The table below was taken from here. It includes the republics of the USSR and autonomous republics.

	Number of registered electors		Participated in the referendum		Votes "Yes"		Votes "No"		Invalid votes
	Number of registered electors			%		%		%		%
	1		2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
Russia	105.643.364		79.701.169	75,4	56.860.783	71,3	21.030.753	26,4	1.809.633	2,3
Ukraine	37.732.178		31.514.244	83,5	22.110.899	70,2	8.820.089	28,0	583.256	1,8
Byelorussia	7.354.796		6.126.983	83,3	5.069.313	82,7	986.079	16,1	71.591	1,2
Uzbekistan	10.278.938		9.816.333	95,4	9.196.848	93,7	511.373	5,2	108.112.	1,1
Kazakhstan	9.999.433		8.816.543	88,2	8.295.519	94,1	436.560	5,0	84.464	0,9
Azerbaijan	3.866.659		2.903.797	75,1	2.709.246	93,3	169.225	5,8	25.326	0,9
Kyrgyzstan	2.341646		2.174.593	92,9	2.057.971	96,4	86.245	4,0	30.377	1,4
Tajikistan	2.549.096		2.407.552	94,4	2.315.755	96,2	75.300	3,1	16.497	0,7
Turkmenistan	1.847.310		1.804.138	97,7	1.766.584	97,9	31.203	1,7	6.351	0,4
Bashkiria	2.719.637		2.221.158	81,7	1.908.875	85,9	269.007	12,1	43.276	2,0
Buryatia	668.231		535.802	80,2	447.438	83,5	78.167	14,6	10.197	1,9
Dagestan	1.008.626		812.009	80,5	670.488	82,6	131.522	16,2	9.999	1,2
Kabardino-Balkaria		489.436	372.607	76,1	290.380	77,9	77.339	20,8	4.888	1,3
Kalmykia	204.301		169.124	82,8	148.462	87,8	17.833	10,5	2.829	1,7
Karelia	551644		418.101	75,8	317.854	76,0	92.703	22,2	7.544	1,8
Komi	797.049		543.403	68,2	412.842	76,0	119.678	22,0	10.883	2,0
Mari El	525.685		418.599	79,6	333.319	79,6	77.239	18,5	8.041	1,9
Mordovia	677.706		571.631	84,3	459.021	80,3	101.886	17,8	10,724	1,9
North Ossetia	428.307		367.858	85,9	331.823	90,2	32.786	8,9	3.249	0,9
Tatarstan	2.532.383		1.951.768	77,1	1.708.193	87,5	211.516	10,8	32.059	1,7
Tuva	171.731		138.496	80,6	126.598	91,4	9.404	6,8	2.494	1,8
Udmurtia	1.103.083		819.140	74,3	622.714	76,0	180.289	22,0	16.137	2,0
Chechnya and Ingushetia	712.139		419.012	58,8	318.059	75,9	94.737	22,6	6.216	1,5
Chuvashia	900.913		748.420	81,3	616.387	82,4	113.249	15,1	18.784	2,5
Yakutia	688.679		541.993	78.7	415.712	76,7	116.798	21,6	9.483	1,8
Karakalpak	584.208		577.717	98.9	563.916	97,6	10.133	1,8	3.668	0,6
Abkhazia	318.317		166.544	52,3	164.231	98,6	1.566	0,9	747	0,5
Nakhichevan	174.364		35.866	20,6	31.328	87,3	3.620	10,1	918	2,6
The governments of Baltic republics, Georgia, Moldova and Armenia boycotted the referendum, the central election committees were not created. A number of local election committees were formed, though, and some people participated in the referendum. The results are below (excluding the results from Soviet military bases):
	1		2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
Georgia	45.696		44.012	96,3	43.950	99,9	9	-	53	0,1
Lithuania	582.262		501.375	86,1	496.050	98,9	4.355	0,9	970	0,2
Moldova	841.507		700.893	83,3	688.905	98,3	8.916	1,3	3.072	0,4
Latvia	670.828		436.783	65,1	415.147	95,1	18.015	4,1	3,621	0,8
Armenia	4.923		3.549	72,1	2.549	71,6	966	27,2	42	1,2
Estonia	299.681		222.240	74.2	211.090	95,0	10.040	4,5	1.110	0,5
Ajaria
Military detachments located in boycotting republics
	1.261.721		1.233.858	97,8	1.107.980	89.8	113.283	9,2	12.595	1,0

An even more detailed breakup by regions of Russia can be found here: Russia. March Referendum 1991.

Some things common to Russia and UK

2009-03-02T21:26:00.002Z

A little warm-up after the long absence :).

A phrase I heard today on Russian TV:

There are two countries in Europe, where people, when saying "Europe", mean all European countries but their own: Russia and Great Britain.

Which reminds me of a recent dialog. A friend of mine who just finished reading The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk, summed up his impressions: "Britain and Russia are enemies forever. It's a huge mystery how we managed to become allies in both world wars". I replied: "Look from a different angle. Russia and Britain always desired the same: to get a grip of Middle Asia, Afghanistan and Persia in the 19th century and to beat Germans in the 20th." We agreed that we would wait for the two countries to become the best friends in the 21st :)

Yesterday's papers: Russian newspapers from 1909

2009-01-23T13:59:00.001Z

(From Starosti.ru)

In 1909, just like in the previous three years, Russian major cities, especially Moscow and St.Petersburg, awaited for the 22 January (9 January Old Style) with anxiety. Four years ago, in 1905, on this day, the first Russian revolution began. On the next day, 23 January (10 January Old Style), Golos Moskvy wrote:

This day, 9 January, was calm. Only some days earlier, the workers' groups discussed how they should commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Gapon's demonstration. The opinions split. A part of the workers proposed to stop working after dinner, but this proposal was rejected. The majority of the workers would rather forget Gapon then to commemorate him. Today, on 9 January, the life in the workers' quarters went on as usually. All plants worked full day, there were no demonstrations, nor even enforced police detachments.

The problems in Caucasus persisted:

From Vladikavkaz, 8 Jan 1909. Son of the sheep-farmer Koshel, kidnapped on 26 November, was released by the abreks without ransom. Earlier, his father refused to pay the 16,000 rubles ransom. Army was deployed in the Ingush villages. They threatened that the aborigines will carry the responsibility in case of the death of the victim of kidnapping. The released boy told that he was kept in the corn fields, than in the woods. Sometimes he was brought to villages with a bandage on his eyes and locked in barns.

However, not always the local population caused these problems:

From Rostov on Don, 9 Jan 1909. The persons guilty of numerous recent train robberies along the Vladikavkaz railroad were identified and detained. The culprits were railroad workers. To commit the crimes, they used to disguise as natives.

While we're talking about trains:

Today, on 9 January, at 10:15 a.m., the first express train will depart from Moscow to Berlin and Paris. The train will travel with the speed never heard of before, it will take only 54 hours to get to Paris. This is a train-de-luxe, it consists of only three first class carriages and a restaurant and it is modeled after the best European trains. It will depart once a week, on Fridays, and the arrival is scheduled on Wednesdays, to agree with the Siberian trains in Moscow and the St.Petersburg express in Warsaw.

An interesting news came from the governorate of Livonia:

From Mitau (modern Jelgava in Latvia), 9 Jan 1909. A whole eighth class of the aristocratic German gymnasium, the stronghold of the culture of the Baltic barons, decided to leave the gymansium and to pass the state exams in the Russian gymnasium. This decision produced a shocking impression in the German nationalist circles.

As for the other countries, the events were still moving incessantly toward the August of 1914:

From Sarajevo, 9 Jan 1909. The holiday of the saint Savva, the enlightener and the first apostle of the Serbs, will not be celebrated in this year in Bosnia and Herzegovina to mourn the current situation of the country. Of course, it is true only for schools. In churches, the St.Savva's day will be celebrated.

From Wien, 8 Jan 1909. The journalists in Constantinople report that on last Sunday large anti-Austrian manifestations took place in Tripoli. The crowd attacked the Austrian consul and vice consul. At the same time, pro-Italian demonstrations were held.

From Zemlin, 8 Jan 1909. A bloody conflict between Serbs and Hungarians took place in Southern Hungary. About 50 Hungarians attacked the Serbian monastery Raganica, planning to steal the shrine of Prince Lazarus. The monks defended the monastery. The peasants heard the sounds of shooting and hurried to the monastery. When the police and the army arrived, there were five people killed and about fifty wounded and the battlefield.

From Mostar, 8 Jan 1909. Famine in Herzegovina. Delegates from villages come to Mostar and ask the Austrian authorities for bread. The authorities reply that they will help if the villages sign the petition agreeing with the annexion of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The peasants refuse.

A year ago I wrote about the participation of Russian sailors in the rescue operations in Italy, after the earthquake in Messina. On 22 January 1909, the newspapers wrote:

From Odessa, 8 Jan 1909. The captain of the steamboat Catania that arrived from Messina to Odessa, reported that a group of Russian sailors who saved three little children, whose parents died in the earthquake, asked the Italian royal couple for the permission to adopt the children. Russian sailors promised to bring them to St.Petersburg, to educate them and to provide for them till the end of their lives. The permission was granted.

I assume these children were around 10 years old then. So, eight years later, in 1917, they would be no more than 18. I wonder what happened to them...

January 20 in Russian history. Cornelis de Bruijn. Execution in Moscow.

2009-01-20T14:50:00.004Z

Sorry for the long silence. That flu is awful and it doesn't end. Poor doctors don't know what to do :). I've spent more time with them in January than in the previous five years, I think.

A little bit more than 200 years ago, in autumn 1701, a Dutchman came to Russia. He departed from the Hague in June and in September he arrived to Arkhangelsk. He spent two years in Russia, till July 1703. In 1707-1708 he visited Russia once again and in 1711 he published a book about his travels to Russia, Persia and India. Besides, he visited Egypt, Palestine, Ottoman empire, His name was Cornelis de Bruijn (other spellings include Cornelius de Bruyn, Corneille le Brun, Kornelius de Bruin, etc.). He was a painter and he was able to earn enough for his travel to Italy in 1674-1677. On the other hand, a number of historians are a bit skeptical about his talents and suspect he made money from espionage. This way or the other, from Italy he moved to Greece and Asia Minor. He spent many years travelling all along the Eastern Mediterranean till, in 1693, he came back to the Netherlands, where he published his first book, Travels in the Principal Parts of Asia Minor. In 1701, he received a proposal to make another journey and write a new book, this time about Russia and Persia.

His adventurous character made him to agree and in 1701 he left to Russia. He came to Arkhangelsk, visited Vologda and Yaroslavl and came to Moscow in early 1702. He made friends with Alexander Menshikov, an associate of the tsar, and then with Peter the Great himself. In 1703, he resumed his journey, went down river Volga to Astrakhan and then to Persia, India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. There, numerous diseases made him to abandon his earlier plans and to retrace his way back to Persia, Russia and then home to the Netherlands.

De Bruijn died in 1726 or in 1727 in dire poverty. The only things left from him are some paintings, two books and a touristy inscription he scratched on the wall of the Achaemenid palace in Persepolis, which is still there.

De Bruijn's second book includes very interesting information about Russia. He wrote about the Samoyeds, who lived in Northern Russia, described many regions of the country, including my home town Samara and other cities along Volga, he analyzed the first periods of the Peter's reforms and wrote about the conflicts of the old Muscovy traditions and the new institutions of the newborn Russian empire, described the early years of the Russian fleet, left a topographical description of Moscow and so on. Many historians say that his Voyage to the Levant and Travels into Moscovy, Persia, and the East Indies is the best book about Russia written in the first half of the 18th century.

I have to admit that I don't know which calendar De Bruijn used in his book. The Gregorian calendar was adopted in the Netherlands about 120 years before De Bruijn. In Russia, the Julian calendar was in use, and the difference between them was 10 days in the 18th century. It might seem natural to suggest that De Bruijn used the Gregorian calendar, but it seems to me that either he used the Swedish calendar (the difference was 1 day with the Russian calendar) or the Russian 1873 edition of De Bruijn used the Old Style calendar. I assumed the latter. So, the following excerpt, dated by 9 January 1702, may or may not correspond to 20 January in New Style :).

1702

(9 January Old Style)

On the 9th day of this month a terrible execution of a fifty-years old lady, who killed her husband, was committed in Moscow. It was ruled that she should be buried alive up to her shoulders. I was curious enough to have a look at her and I found her half-buried, and she seemed to me rather fresh and pretty. A white towel was tied around her head and neck, which she asked to untie, because it very tight. She was guarded by three or four soldiers who received orders not to allow her to eat or drink, which could prolong her life. But it was allowed to throw some copecks (small coins) to the hole where she was buried, for which she thanked by bowing her head. The money is usually used to buy the wax candles to be put in front of the icons of the saints, to whom the convicts appeal, or, in part, to buy the coffin for them. I am not certain whether the guards take some of this money in exchange for giving some food to the convicts secretly, because some of them live quite a long time being buried. But the woman I saw died on the next day after I had seen her. On the same day, a man was burned, whose crime I am not aware of.

The story of this woman was later used by Alexey Tolstoy in his book Peter the First.

Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T09:03:00.004Z

Some old NY postcards:

1960:

1968:

1970:

1971:

1975:

Happy New Year and wish you new labor feats!

December 25 in Russian history

2008-12-25T09:18:00.002Z

1991

On 25 December 1991 the president of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev handed the case with the “nuclear button” to the president of Russia Boris Yeltsin. At 19:00 MSK, in a TV address to the nation, Gorbachev announced that he resigned the position of the president of the USSR because the Commonwealth of the Independent States had been formed. At 19:38, the flag of the USSR was replaced with the new flag of Russia on the dome of the Kremlin Palace.

Half a year earlier, on 17 March 1991, during the referendum, 76.43% of the Soviet citizens who participated in the referendum voted Yes to preserve the Soviet Union in the form of the federation of equal republics. After the GKChP coup attempt it seemed impossible to comply with the results of the referendum and on the 8 December the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia signed the agreement on the dissolution of the Soviet Union and creation of the Commonwealth of the Independent States (CIS). All this ended with the resignation of M. Gorbachev.

Eventually, the nationalists superseded communists in all former republics of the USSR. Same thing only different.

On the same day in 1991, Boris Yeltsin signed the bill on the renaming of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to Russian Federation. Tajikistan ratified the agreement on the creation of CIS.

Just think that all this happened 17 years ago... Sorry for the triviality, the time flies.

2000

On 25 December 2000, the second president of Russian Federation V. Putin signed three laws: on the national anthem, on the national flag and the national coat of arms. The new anthem was the anthem of the Soviet Union (with slightly modified lyrics), the new coat of arms was borrowed from the tsarist Russia (it even has the royal crown), and the new flag was the flag of democratic Russia (it had been used also by the White Guard).

December 15 in Russian history. Elena Molokhovets.

2008-12-15T11:23:00.005Z

1918

On 15 December 1918 Elena Molokhovets (née Burman) was buried in St.Petersburg. It is not known when she died, only one record was found in a cemetery registration book. 1918 was not a good year to die.

The name of Molokhovets, long forgotten, is now very popular. She wrote a number of books (including such immortal bullshit like "Monarchy, Nationalism and Orthodoxy" (1910) or "The Voice of The Russian Woman on National, Spiritual, Religious and Moral Revival of Russia" (1906)), but only one of them survived for more almost 150 years. It is a cookbook A Gift to Young Housewives or a Mean to Decrease Expenses in Household. When the name of Molokhovets began its comeback in the early 1990s, the period of economic hardships in Russia, most of us knew just one quotation from this book: "If guests payed an unexpected visit to your home, and you have nothing to dine them, send a man to the cellar to fetch a hind quarter, a pound of butter and a dozen of eggs..." Ironically, this phrase is not found in the book, but it conveys the spirit quite well. The book is a monument to the years when hind quarters were stored in the cellars (not all of them, of course) and the butter was bought in pounds (if you had some money left after you had bought bread). When Yevgeny Zamyatin, the author of the famous dystopia We, left Soviet Russia, he wrote: "The two most popular authors among Russian émigrés are Molokhovets in the first place, and Pushkin in the second." On 20 May 1911, the Birzheviye Vedomosti newspaper wrote: "Tomorrow, on 21 May, it will be exactly 50 years since the first edition of the well known to everyone book, A gift to young housewives, compiled by E.M.Molokhovets. The first edition was issued on 21 May 1861 and was published since then in 26 editions, 10 to 15 thousand copies each, in total number of 300,000 copies, and it seems that there's not a single family in Russia who do not have a copy of the book."

In the foreword, Elena explained that the goal of the book was to teach young ladies the tricks and subtleties of housekeeping. To avoid possible misunderstandings, Elena pedantically indicates exact amount of ingredients, unlike authors of other cookbooks of that period. She teaches, lectures and almost moralizes on the art of housekeeping. A literary almanac joked in 1884 that "Molokhovets is convinced that cooking on fire is her invention, and that without her guidance people will be unable to put the spoon in their mouth. Every dish not cooked in accordance with her book is forged for her, and everyone who does not follow her lessons is her personal foe".

In one of her other books, a housekeeping encyclopedia called To the Russian People, she gives such invaluable recipes like: "If your palms sweat often, take two frogs in your hands and hold them till they die." Or "during the birth pangs, the best cure is a prayer". The Russian Society for the Public Health Care was enraged: "We cannot decide what is more objectionable: the impermissible ignorance of M-me.Molokhovets or her impudence".

Her family life was sorrowful. Her husband died. Her youngest son was sent to mental hospital. Of her ten children only two outlived her. But she died in the age of 87. What happened to her between 1917 and her death, we do not know. Probably, she starved. If 1918 was not a good year to die, it was not a good year to keep living, either.

Her books are still available in bookstores (even in English). There's a restaurant in St.Pete named Mechta Molokhovets (Molokhovets' Dream) and NY Times' readers say it's one of the best restaurants in the city.

Wikipedia article about A Gift to Young Housewives:

A Gift to Young Housewives (Подарок молодым хозяйкам) is a Russian cookbook written by Elena Ivanovna Molokhovets (Елена Ивановна Молоховец). It was the most successful book of its kind in 19th- and early 20th-century Russia.[1] Molokhovets revised the book continually between 1861 and 1917, a period of time falling between the emancipation of the serfs and the Communist Revolution. The book was well known in Russian households during publication and for decades afterwards.[2]

The original series went through 20 editions and sold 295,000 copies. The book gave instructions for elaborate dishes like suckling pig, Madeira cake, and hazel grouse. Other recipes included soups, fritters, tortes, mushrooms, aspics, mousses, and dumplings. There were also instructions on making jam, mustard, and vodka. Although the number of recipes varied by edition, there were as many as 3,218 in the 1897 edition.[3]

In addition to recipes, the book covered cooking techniques, utensils and cooking equipment, stoves and ovens, household management, relations with servants, menus for feast days, and nutrition; it also gave time- and money-saving hints.[3]

During the Soviet era, the book, written for the middle class and aristocrats, was condemned as "bourgeois and decadent", mainly because of its aristocratic tone and obvious disparagement of the lower classes. The book, for instance, says that "fresh roach is not very tasty and barely useful; it is, therefore, best used to feed the servants."[4] Also, it was mostly outdated for the 20th century, as for obvious reasons it didn't cover usage of modern kitchen equipment: refrigerators, electric and gas ovens, etc.

In the post-war USSR, a time when people dealt with food shortages, long lines, and a scarcity of the necessary ingredients, cookbooks were mostly seen as a laughable anachronism.[3] For example, one recipe for babka called for ingredients such as 60 to 70 eggs, which few people could afford at that time. But as life was getting better the need for cookbooks and complex recipes was arising. In 1952 "The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food" was published to replace outdated "Gift" as an everyday cookbook.

Joyce Toomre adapted and translated recipes and other content from the various editions into a 1992 book published as Classic Russian Cooking: Elena Molokhovets' a Gift to Young Housewives.

Now, I need to go and fetch something from the cellar... Sorry. Bye for now.

December 12 in Russian history. War in Afghanistan.

2008-12-12T09:25:00.006Z

1979

On 12 December 1979, the Politbureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union adopted the secret resolution 176/125 "On the situation in `A'", where A stands for Afghanistan. It was the decision to deploy Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

After the bloodless coup in 1973, when Daoud dethroned the shah, Daoud launched reforms, trying to modernize the country. He disbanded the parliament, banned all political parties and formed an authoritarian regime. His reforms were not supported neither by the fundamentalists, nor by the pro-communist factions. In 1978, after the still mysterious murder of a leader of the pro-communist party PDPA Mir Akbar Khyber, PDPA revolted and Daoud was killed during the coup. The Soviet government was caught in surprise, but they decided to provide economic support to the socialist reforms undertaken by the new leader, Taraki. The reforms were radical. Islam was proclaimed "the religion of the exploiters", the tribal customs and religious traditions were dismissed. The programs of democratization, liquidation of illiteracy and national discrimination were launched. It caused the rise of the fundamentalist opposition. At the same time, Taraki instilled the "cult of personality" absolutely in the style of Stalin. Party members wore badges with his portrait, museums were built where he had lived, during the meetings at least five portraits of Taraki had to be hanged, he was called "the father of the peoples of Afghanistan" and "the great leader of the revolution and the teacher of the workers" and so on. Moscow was aware of the growing opposition to Taraki and PDPA. In July 1979, the US administration began a propaganda campaign and financial aid to the fundamentalists, trying to increase the resistance to the pro-Soviet regime. The main competitor of Taraki, though, was not the fundamentalist opposition, but his deputy, Amin. Even more than the Kremlin, Afghanistan reminded of the bulldogs fighting under the carpet. Taraki attempted to poison Amin, but failed. In the end, Amin himself killed Taraki in October 1979. But it didn't help him. The attempts to assassinate him continued. In the meanwhile, the Soviet political advisors only attempted to stabilize the situation. The Kremlin did not like working with the successor, whose politics was too much like the one led by Taraki. Former prime-minister of Afghanistan Sultan Ali Keshtmand wrote that the regime of Amin was totalitarian. The repressions were getting even worse. Soviet diplomats even had to convince him to drop his plans to include the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the constitution of Afghanistan.

Both Taraki and Amin insisted that the USSR should deploy the troops in Afghanistan, but the Soviets refused. Since January 1979, they supplied weapons to the Afghanistan government, sent military advisors, doctors and engineers there and were very unwilling to do anything else. The brutality of the Amin's regime finally convinced them that something has to be done. The first Soviet detachments were deployed in Afghanistan in July 1979, they had to guard the airport in Bagram and the embassy, but in November 1979, the Soviet government considered the possibility of the mass deployment.

On 12 December, the Politbureau adopted the resolution 176/125. The gist was that Hafizullah Amin must be replaced by Babrak Karmal and that the troops had to be deployed in Afghanistan to stabilize the situation. The task of the military was not clearly defined. It was formulated in the most vague diplomatic terms. The army was not certain what they were expected to do. Hence, numerous errors in the preparation phase.

In the end, the Soviets entered Afghanistan, occupied the Amin's palace (Amin was found dead inside) and became involved in the feudal wars. More than 14,000 Soviet soldiers were killed. Almost half a million were wounded or sick. Karmal had to resign in 1986 and his place was taken by Najibullah. In 1989, the Soviet army left Afghanistan. Soviet and Russian generals agree that it was not a loss or the war, that they have fulfilled the tasks: the friendly government survived, the opposition was contained, the mujahideen never captured a single city or ran a single large scale offensive and the Soviet troops, buildings and communications were safe. Humanitarian goods were delivered in time. All actions of the Soviet 40th army in Afghanistan were either preventive or retaliation strikes.

However, after the end of the operation it was the task of the diplomats and politicians to prevent the creation of an inimical state on the borders of the USSR, and they failed.

The USA, who did their best trying "to induce a Soviet military intervention", later spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting the fundamentalist opposition. In exchange, they have got Al Qaeda, which was born in Afghanistan, in the camps of the anti-Soviet mujahideen. Such is the sad story of the end of the Cold War.

Photographs taken from the following web pages (click to see more):

soldat.ru
lenvoku.ru
afganvet.ru

Update @2008-12-12 23:40: Oh, and the Afghanistan payed for independence with the never-ending civil war. Eventually, they somehow ended up losing the independence again. Sometimes I think that the best that could have happened for all interested sides would be if the Afghans had decided to join the USSR :)

December 11 in Russian history. Nikolay Ozerov.

2008-12-11T11:33:00.003Z

1922

In 1922, Nikolay Ozerov was born. Fifty years later he became one of the most notable symbols of the Soviet epoch. Remember the Big Red Machine, the Soviet ice-hockey team? Ozerov was the sportscaster, the man whose voice was inseparable from the games of the Machine.

From World Wide Hockey Hall of Fame:

Ozerov was not well-known to the west, as Sweden's Patrick Houda told us.

"I would say that Ozerov's name is only known among the old journalists over here in Sweden. But the same thing goes for Foster Hewitt who was almost an icon in Canadian broadcasting," Houda said.

"Canada had Foster Hewitt, the Russians had Nikolay Ozerov, the Czechs had Josef Laufer and Sweden had Lennart Hyland. All helped popularize the sport thanks to their great radio and TV broadcasts."

Arthur Chidlovski grew up in the Soviet Union, listening to Ozerov. Chidlovski said, "Ozerov's reports from the 1972 Summit belong to the classics of TV broadcasting. When the Soviets won the first game in Montreal, Ozerov said that the 'myth of unbeatable self-praised Canadian hockey professionals is over now.' "

Chidlovski added that although not intentional, Ozerov's phraseology would sometimes send a nation of hockey fans into fits of laughter.

In 1974, the WHA played the Soviets in an lesser-known eight-game series, won by the Russians, and Ozerov was there to broadcast the only international tournaments played by Bobby Hull and Gordie Howe.

"Gordie Howe is a legend of Canadian hockey," said Ozerov. "He is 46, has over 1000 scars on his body, his hair is gray but it's still not enough for him. Life is expensive and Howe needs money. He plays himself and forces his children to play too. His sons, Mark and Marty, are playing for Team Canada too. Canadian hockey pros don't wear helmets. They wear nothing. The only one who wears anything is Bobby Hull. He wears a wig."

That was enough to convince several of the North Americans on the committee that Foster Hewitt wasn't the only person who had hickey fans turned on and tuned into the radio.

His father was an opera singer and since his childhood Ozerov loved opera and knew by heart all operas from the repertoire of the Bolshoi theatre. When he was 9, he started playing tennis. Three years later he won the boys' championship of Moscow. In the end of the 1930s, when Henri Cochet, famous French tennis player, came to Moscow and visited the stadium to look at training children. "This fatty will go far", said he about Ozerov. He was right. 24 times Ozerov won the USSR tennis championships (in men's singles, men's doubles and mixed doubles).

In 1970s Ozerov met Cochet once again, when he visited the open championship of France in Rollan Garros. When he came back to Moscow, someone reported to KGB that Ozerov met a Frenchman who, probably, collaborated with the Nazis during the war. Ozerov had problems on TV, till another popular journalist, Valentin Zorin, found out that during the war Cochet was a member of the Resistance movement.

In 1941 he entered the theatre institute in Moscow and earned the "Master of Sports" title. During the war he participated in some "propaganda" tennis games. There were only three tennis players left in Moscow then, and they played on all tennis stadiums, and the radio broadcasted all these games to raise the spirit of the Muscovites.

After the war Ozerov became a theatre actor in the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT), one of the best theatres in the country. In the evenings, after the performance was over, he ran to play tennis or football (he played for Spartak, Moscow). In 1950, Vadim Sinyavsky, a famous sports journalist of those times, offered Ozerov to join him during a football game. So Ozerov became a sportscaster. Good knowledge of sports and the artistic talent made him the ideal candidate for the job. After the first game between Dinamo and TsDKA, the radio bosses waited for some time for the reaction of the listeners, but the responses were positive and Ozerov was now allowed to comment all football games.

Ozerov worked on 17 Olympic games, 9 football world championships, 30 hockey championships, in 50 countries. Once he had to work, sitting on a top of a tree. In Kiev, he worked on the roof of the stadium. In 1972, during the unforgettable Summit games between Soviet and Canadian hockey teams, Ozerov was in Munich, on the Olympic games, but nobody could even think of someone else working in Canada, so Ozerov commented the games watching them from Munich, and nobody ever learned it till many years later. Every time I recall the games of the Soviet hockey team, I still can hear his voice, saying one of his famous phrases, like: "So, these are the vaunted Canadian profies..." or "No, this is not the hockey we need!". The old rumors tell about another his phrase: "Goal! No! F*ck! Post!", but I don't know anyone who actually heard it :).

Ozerov once recalled a funny story. When he once came to a post-office, he noticed a vaguely familiar old man. Some seconds later he understood, it was Vyacheslav Molotov, former Soviet prime-minister and foreign minister, retired by Khrushchev in 1957. Ozerov offered him a ride, Molotov agreed, but he didn't recognize Ozerov. Some minutes later he said: "I can't recall you, but your face is somehow familiar. Have we met before?" "No", replied Ozerov, "but you might have heard me on radio. I'm sportscaster Ozerov. Nikolay Nikolayevich.". After a pause, Molotov replied: "My wife won't believe me: Ozerov himself gave me a ride!"

Theatre and cinema star Mikhail Ulyanov said: "Just like we cannot imagine the 1940s without the voice of Levitan, we cannot imagine 1950s-1980s without the voice of Ozerov, his passion and enchanting love to sports". The unique feature of Ozerov was his optimism, enthusiasm, sincerity and not a single aggressive note, only deepest respect to the sportsmen.

In the end of 1980s Ozerov was forced to leave the TV. Soon, when he was in Middle Asia, because of some infection, he lost his leg. He could not afford buying crutches, so the widow of Lev Yashin gave him her deceased husbnand's crutches. On 2 June 1997 Nikolay Ozerov died.

Here's an article about Ozerov written by Arthur Chidlovski (mentioned above):

Nikolay OZEROV was the legend of the Soviet sports broadcasting. For millions of Russian hockey fans, he was what Foster Hewitt was for the Canadian viewers and listeners. Ozerov never played hockey. Although he was a star tennis player in the 1940s, only a few historians associate his name with tennis. He acted professionally on the stage of legendary Moscow Arts Theater but very few people remember him as an actor. But for those who watched hockey on TV from 1950s to 1980s , Ozerov's name can't be separated from hockey. In a way, he was Mr. Hockey or, keeping up with the terminology of his prime time in broadcasting, Comrade Hockey. During these glorious decades in Soviet hockey, generations of viewers watched his hockey reports from Moscow and Toronto, Voskresensk and Helsinki, Montreal and Stockholm, Prague and Kiev.

Ozerov's reports from the 1972 Summit belong to the classics of TV broadcasting. I am not sure if it was the drama of the Series, the level of hockey shown in the Summit or the passion in Ozerov's voice that made these games in September 1972 one of the best sports spectacles ever shown on the Soviet TV.

When the Soviets won the first game in Montreal, Ozerov said that the "myth of unbeatable self-praised Canadian hockey professionals is over now." I was just a little kid at that time and watched many games after the Summit, but this phrase by Ozerov is still in my memory.

The difference between the Soviet and Canadian styles was obvious. "We don't need this kinda hockey!" This is another saying from Ozerov's reports in 1972. Although it was said in regard to the Team Canada's tough and sometimes brutal by the European standards hockey, the phrase itself went well beyond hockey.

Ozerov was not a comedian but it was his entertaining reports that made the whole nation laugh on his phrases and sometimes mistakes. In 1974, legendary Gordy Howe and Bobby Hull played in the Team Canada (WHA) vs. Team USSR Summit.

"Gordy Howe is a legend of Canadian hockey," said Ozerov. "He is 46, has over 1000 scars on his body, his hair is gray but it's still not enough for him. Life is expensive and Howe needs money. He plays himself and forces his children to play too. His sons, Mark and Marty, are playing for Team Canada too."

"Canadian hockey pros don't wear helmets. They wear nothing. The only one who wears anything is Bobby Hull. He wears a wig." Almost 30 years passed since Ozerov said these lines, but I still remember wondering what might happen to the Hull's wig in the game or counting Howe's 1000 scars.

Making my memory trips to the 1972 Summit, I always think about Ozerov. I guess it's not just me. He was an integral part of Soviet hockey of that time.

Yesterday's papers: Gilyarovsky

2008-12-10T13:54:00.005Z

(From Starosti.ru)

On 10 December, 1908 (27 November Old Style), Russkoye Slovo newspaper wrote:

Yesterday, well known journalist and writer Vladimir Alexeyevich Gilyarovsky celebrated 25th anniversary of his life in literature. For the whole day postmen were delivering congratulations from numerous admirers of Gilyarovsky's talent: from the chairman of the charitable society for senile theatre actors Garin-Winding, from the agricultural society to its first secretary, from Mr.Moter from Prague, the translator of Gilyarovsky's stories into Czech language, from Bulgaria, from Don Cossacks and others.

The Fisher's Photography presented the artistic portrait of the hero of the day. By the way, a deputation of vagabonds from Hitrov market also visited Vladimir Alexeyevich. One of the received letters was from the narodnik writer Maxim Semyonov, with the stamp of the jail where the author currently serves his sentence.

Wikipedia is rather laconic about Gilyarovsky:

Vladimir Alekseyevich Gilyarovsky (Russian: Владимир Алексеевич Гиляровский, 26 November 1853 - October 1, 1935), was a Russian writer and newspaper journalist, best known for his reminiscences of life in pre-Revolutionary Moscow ("Moscow and Muscovites"), which he first published in a book form in 1926.

He was born on the 26 November 1855 (according to church records, 1853 according to his own writings) on a manor near Vologda where his father, a Novgorodian, worked as an assistant to the manor's bailiff, a Zaporozhian Cossack whose daughter he later married. Gilyarovsky treasured his partly Cossack descent: as a young man, he posed for one of the Cossacks depicted on Repin's huge canvas Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (this part of the picture is on the right. DM); he was also a model for Taras Bulba, whose figure is part of the Gogol Monument in Moscow.

Raised by his well-educated mother (who died when he was 8) and his aristocratic stepmother, he left home early and, after a series of odd jobs (which included stints at a toxic lead paint factory in Yaroslavl, as a tutor and as a barge hauler), he enlisted as a volunteer during the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish war. After a short career as a provincial actor, he established himself as a journalist, winning praise and notoriety as one of the best crime reporters in Moscow. His first book, "The Stories of the Slums" (1887) recorded his experiences with the Moscow underworld, the Moscow of poverty and crime, finding its epitome in the area of Khitrovka.

After the revolution he dedicated himself to writing memoirs. Among those were "My Travels" (1928), "Newspaper Moscow" (published posthumously), recording his reminiscences of the newspaper business of pre-revolutionary Moscow and of some famous people he'd worked with (such as Anton Chekhov), and "Theatre People" (also published posthumously). He died in Moscow on October 1, 1935.

Some days ago I couldn't find the English translations of poems by Cherubina de Gabriak, so now I am a bit disappointed by the absence of Gilyarovsky's stories in English. The translators still have a lot of work :). In the meanwhile, learn Russian and read these stories here. Or, just to get a general idea of what he wrote about and how he wrote, reread The Road by Jack London and imagine it was written in Moscow.

A short biography of Gilyarovsky was written by Lyubov Tsarevskaya and translated by the authors of Voices from Russia blog:

Some people become living legends. One such person in Russian history was Vladimir Gilyarovsky, a reporter who at the turn of the twentieth century was famous throughout Moscow, and was lovingly dubbed “Uncle Gilyai” by Muscovites. In giving directions to a coachman, you would simply say, “To Gilyarovsky”, and you would be taken straight to his house in Stoleshnikov Lane in the very heart of Moscow. Today, the house bears a memorial plaque. Next to his name stands but one word, “writer”. This tells the truth, of course, but not the whole truth. Nevertheless, no plaque can be large enough to carry the list of all the occupations and merits of this amazing man.

The future writer spent his early years in the town of Volga in northern Russia. At 17, he dropped out of school, and ran away from home leaving a note that said, “I’m gone to work as a manual labourer on the Volga”. This meant he would become a barge hauler, a hard occupation that required extraordinary physical strength and endurance. However, Gilyarovsky had such strength. He received it from his father. Once, as a grown-up, he came home and just for fun tied a poker in a knot. Of course, his father got angry, “why should my son damage kitchen utensils!”, but he did not say a word to his son. He simply took the poker and… undid the knot!

During the first decade after he left home, Gilyarovsky tried a variety of odd jobs. He worked as a barge-hauler and docker on the Volga, as a horse-herder, and volunteered to fight in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, serving in a unit consisting of audacious intelligence officers. For his conspicuous bravery, he received the highest military award, the Order of St George. Then, Gilyarovsky joined a circus and enraptured the public with the daredevil stunt of racing on an unsaddled horse. Travelling with a company of wandering actors, he acted on the stage himself and dabbled in simple plays. He faced numerous dangers, and many times was on the verge of death. Nevertheless, he lived to be 83! He followed his own recipe of longevity, “Don’t let anybody or anything scare you, never be angry, and you will live 100 years”. His cheerful audacity and good-nature also came from his parents as well as his last name itself, which was given to his father when he entered seminary. In Latin, it means “cheerful”, and it was changed into a Russian last name. Gilyarovsky’s father never became a priest, but, the name stuck.

Update @2008-12-10 20:28: Etymologically, a more exact translation would be not "cheerful", but "hilarious". Both "hilarious" and "Gilyarovsky" are derived from Latin "hilaritas" and Greek "ἱλαρός" with the same meaning "cheerful, merry". DM

In 1881, at the age of 28, Gilyarovsky made Moscow his home, and lived there until his death in 1935. In Moscow, he became the recognised king of reporters, a journalist who knew today what was going to happen tomorrow. He described this ability in these words, “Many can see the facts. However, it is up to reporters to take a careful look at things. I love my profession with all my heart, and plunge into it often risking my life. Not a single time was my report turned down. Each was strict, verified, and pure truth”.

This was even more amazing since Gilyarovsky covered every aspect of life, ranging from theatre and society news to criminal happenings. He had a perfect knowledge of Moscow, particularly, the districts of the homeless, beggars, and thieves. Muscovites tried to avoid those neighbourhoods. However, Gilyarovsky was not scared. He sympathised with the hopeless, and understood the tragedy of their situation. Outcasts trusted him, and often turned to him for help. Gilyarovsky entitled his first book People of the Slums. The government censors suppressed the book and burned the whole edition.

After a long interval, Gilyarovsky issued several more books about Moscow and Muscovites, which put together, one might describe as an encyclopaedia of Moscow’s life at the turn of the twentieth century. No one produced a more extensive and trustworthy record of those days. As another twentieth century writer, Konstantin Paustovsky, put it, “Gilyarovsky was picturesque in everything. In his biography, his looks, his manner of speaking, his carefree attitude, and his diversified and many talents…”

December 10 in Russian history. Nobel prize awards.

2008-12-10T12:12:00.004Z

The 10 December, the day when Alfred Nobel died, for more than 100 years has been the day when Nobel prizes are awarded. For the last five years, there were no Russians among the winners. Here's the list of Russian/Soviet Nobel prize winners:

Ivan Pavlov, Physiology or Medicine, 1904
Ilya Mechnikov, Physiology or Medicine, 1908
Ivan Bunin, Literature, 1933
Nikolay Semenov, Chemistry, 1956
Pavel Cherenkov, Physics, 1958
Boris Pasternak, Literature, 1958 (forced to decline)
Lev Landau, Physics, 1962
Aleksandr M. Prokhorov, Physics, 1964
Nicolay G. Basov, Physics, 1964
Michail Sholokhov, Literature, 1965
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Literature, 1970
Leonid Kantorovich, Economics, 1975
Mikhail Gorbachev, Peace, 1990
Zhores I. Alferov, Physics, 2000
Alexei A. Abrikosov, Physics, 2003
Vitaly Ginzburg, Physics, 2003

Some years ago, though, Kommersant newspaper compiled a list of Nobel prize winners with connections to Russia:

Year of award	Category	Name	Relation to Russia (USSR)
1903	Physics	Marie Curie (born Marie Sklodowska)	Born in Warsaw (Russian part of Poland)
1904	Physiology and medicine	Ivan Petrovich Pavlov	Subject of the Russian Empire; later a citizen of the USSR
1905	Literature	Henryk Sienkiewicz	Born in the Russian part of Poland; subject of the Russian Empire
1908	Physiology and medicine	Ilya Ilich Mechnikov	Subject of the Russian Empire
1911	Chemistry	Marie Curie	Born in Warsaw (Russian part of Poland)
1933	Literature	Ivan Alekseevich Bunin	Born in Voronezh (Russian Empire); at the time of the award, a stateless person resident in France
1945	Physiology and medicine	Ernst Boris Chain	Son of a native of Mogileva (Russian Empire, now Belarus)
1952	Physiology and medicine	Selman Abraham Waksman	Born in Priluky (now Ukraine; left the Russian Empire are age 22)
1956	Chemistry	Nikolai Nikolaevich Semenov	Citizen of the USSR
1958	Physics	Igor Evgenevich Tamm	Citizen of the USSR
1958	Physics	Ilya Mikhailovich Frank	Citizen of the USSR
1958	Physics	Pavel Alekseevich Cherenkov	Citizen of the USSR
1958	Literature	Boris Leonidovich Pasternak*	Citizen of the USSR
1960	Physics	Donald Arthur Glaser	Son of a Russian woman (Russian Empire)
1961	Chemistry	Melvin Calvin	Son of Russian immigrants
1962	Physics	Lev Davidovich Landau	Citizen of the USSR
1964	Physics	Nikolai Gennadievich Basov	Citizen of the USSR
1964	Physics	Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov	Citizen of the USSR
1965	Physiology and medicine	André Michel Lvov	Son of Russian immigrants
1965	Literature	Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov	Citizen of the USSR
1970	Literature	Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn	Citizen of the USSR at the time of the award (later stripped of citizenship and expelled from the country; now a citizen of Russia)
1970	Physiology and medicine	Sir Bernard Katz	Son of Russian immigrants
1971	Economics	Simon Smith Kuznets	Born in Kharkov (Russian Empire, now Ukraine); left the country in 1922
1971	Physics	Dennis Gabor	Great-grandson of a Russian subject
1973	Economics	Vasily (Vasilevich) Leontev	Born in St. Petersburg; left the Soviet Union after graduating from Leningrad University in 1925
1975	Peace Prize	Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov	Citizen of the USSR
1975	Economics	Leonid Vitalevich Kantorovich	Citizen of the USSR
1976	Literature	Saul Bellow	Son of Russian immigrants
1977	Chemistry	Ilya (Romanovich) Prigogine	Born in Moscow (Russian Empire); left Russia at age 4
1977	Physiology and medicine	Andrew Victor Schally	Born in Wilno (Poland; later Vilnius, USSR; now Lithuania
1978	Physics	Petr Leonidovich Kapitsa	Citizen of the USSR
1978	Physiology and medicine	Daniel Nathans	Son of Russian immigrants
1979	Physics	Sheldon Lee Glashow (Glukhovsky)	Son of Russian immigrants
1979	Chemistry	Herbert Brown (Brovarnik)	Son of Russian immigrants
1980	Chemistry	Paul Berg	Son of a Russian immigrant
1981	Physics	Arthur Schawlow	Son of a Riga native (Russian Empire, now Latvia)
1981	Chemistry	Roald Hoffmann (Saffran)	Born in the city of Zloczow (Poland; later Zolochev, USSR; now Zolochiv, Ukraine)
1982	Chemistry	Aaron Klug	Born into a family of Russian natives (Russian Empire)
1982	Physiology and medicine	John Vane	Son of Russian immigrants
1986	Physiology and medicine	Stanley Cohen	Son of Russian immigrants
1987	Literature	Joseph Brodsky	Born in Leningrad (USSR); left the country in 1972
1988	Physiology and medicine	Gertrude Bell Elion	Daughter of Russian emigrants
1990	Physics	Jerome Isaac Friedman	Son of Russian immigrants
1990	Peace Prize	Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev	Citizen of the USSR
1995	Peace Prize	Joseph Rotblat	Born in Warsaw; subject of the Russian Empire until Poland declared independence
2000	Physics	Zhores Ivanovich Alferov	Citizen of Russia
2002	Physiology and medicine	Robert Horwitz	Grandson of a Russian immigrant
2003	Physics	Aleksei Alekseevich Abrikosov	Citizen of Russia and the United States
2003	Physics	Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg	Citizen of Russia

December 5 in Russian history. Yet another duel. Cherubina de Gabriak.

2008-12-05T08:42:00.005Z

1909

(22 November Old Style)

Duel of two famous Russian poets, Nikolay Gumilyov and Maximilian Voloshin, took place in St.Petersburg, on Chernaya Rechka, where Alexander Pushkin was killed by Georges d'Anthès on the duel in 1837. The cause of the duel had a mysterious name: Cherubina de Gabriak.

Elizaveta (Lila) Dmitriyeva was a shy young girl from a poor aristocratic family. Tuberculosis left her lame for her life. Her brother and sister used to tell her: "If you are lame, your toys should be lame, too", and tore away legs from her dolls. In 1909, she lived in Koktebel, in Crimea, where the healthy climate was good for her. She wrote poems and met Maximilian Voloshin. Once he brought a gift for her, a wooden imp, named Gabriakh. He also had one leg, one arm and an amiable doggy muzzle. His name was found in a compendium on daemonology, it belonged to an imp who protected people from evil spirits.

Voloshin tried to publish Lila's verses, but they did not impress editors. Then they invented the new name for Lila: Cherubina de Gabriak. Gabriak was, of course, the name of that wooden imp, and the first name Cherubina was taken from the short story A Secret Of Telegraph Hill by Bret Harte. Then the story described in the Wikipedia article about Cherubina followed:

In August 1909, the famous Russian artistic periodical Apollon received a letter with verses on a perfumed paper with black mourning edges, signed only by a single Russian letter Ch. The verses were filled with half-revelations about its author—supposedly a beautiful maiden with dark secrets. The same day a woman with a beautiful voice phoned the journal's publisher Sergei Makovsky and arranged for publication of the verses. Over the next few months, publications of the newfound poetic star were the major hit of the magazine, and many believed that they had found a major new talent in Russian poetry. The identity of the author was slowly revealed: her name was Baroness Cherubina de Gabriak, a Russian-speaking girl of French and Polish ancestry who lived in a very strict Roman Catholic aristocratic family, who severely limited the girl's contacts with the outside world because of an unspoken secret in her past. Almost all of Apollon’s male writers fell in love with her, most of all the great poet Nikolai Gumilyov. He wrote a series of passionate love letters to her and received quite passionate answers.

Makovsky lost his head about Cherubina. He was proud of his talents in graphology and from the letters written by Voloshin and Lila Dmitriyeva he concluded that the author was a daughter of a father from the South France and a Russian mother, that she was raised in a monastery in Toledo. "If I had the annual income of fourty thousand rubles, I would dare to fall in love with her," wrote Makovsky. Lila was a teacher in a gymnasium and earned 11 rubles per month. She must have been an unusual teacher: when an inspector visited her class in the gymnasium and asked the girls who was their favorite tsar, their answer was unanimous and unexpected: Grigory Otrepyev! She graduated from the Imperial Women's Pedagogical Institute and specialized in medieval history and French medieval literature. At the same time she studied Spanish literature and Old French language in the St.Petersburg University and Sorbonne.

Now that she was a mysterious Frech lady, her poems were accepted in all magazines and became known to everyone in St.Petersburg. Lila and Voloshin went on getting fun from the story. They invented a whole family of Cherubina, including her Portuguese cousin, don Harpia de Mantilla. Makovsky must have been really blinded if he payed no attention to the name. The others suspected a mystification, but the suspect was the innocent Makovsky.

The fame of the newfound genius was short-lived. In November it was discovered that Baroness Cherubina de Gabriak did not exist at all, and the verses were written by a disabled schoolteacher, Elisaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva, with the participation of a major Apollon contributor and editor, the poet Maximilian Voloshin.

Apparently Sergei Makovsky had rejected several of Dmitrieva's verses; and Voloshin, who knew his publisher quite well, invented the legend about Cherubina. There is still controversy about the correct attribution of Gabriak's corpus. Most contemporaries, including all of Apollon’s critics, were certain that all the verses and most of the letters were written by Voloshin himself; after all, they claimed, Cherubina was a first-rank poet and Dmitrieva was not. Both Elisaveta Dmitrieva and Maximilian Voloshin claimed that the verses were all Dmitrieva's, and that Voloshin only selected them and suggested themes and expressions. Modern researchers tend to support attribution of the verses to Dmitrieva, as they are quite similar to her later works.

Nikolai Gumilyov was outraged by the thought that his passionate romantic correspondence might in fact have been with a mocking Maximilian Voloshin. Even so, Dmitrieva claimed that she had written the letters to Gumilyov herself, had indeed been in love, but had known the romance would end the moment Gumilyov saw her.

Gumilyov was rude. He told stories in public about his affair with Lila and cruelly ridiculed her. His ungentlemanly conduct made Voloshin to throw down the glove.

On November 19, 1909, at the studio of artist Ivan Bilibin, Gumilyov slapped Voloshin across the face, which by the customs of the time made a duel inevitable. The duel took place on November 22 on the banks of the Chernaya River, which had been the site of the fatal duel between Alexander Pushkin and Georges d'Anthès. Voloshin's second was Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi; Gumilyov's second was Johannes von Gunter.

Wikepedia is wrong. It was Voloshin who slapped Gumilyov and asked: "Do you understand?" "Yes", replied Gumilyov. Only half a year earlier, Voloshin almost called out some other man and Gumilyov had to be his second, but that duel did not happen. This time it was serious.

The peace-loving Voloshin did not want to kill Gumilyov, and wanted even less to be killed himself, so he planned a psychological diversion to defuse the situation. While walking to the place of the duel he lost one of his pair of galoshes in the mud, and claimed that he could not shoot until the missing boot was found. Both seconds started to look for it, and within half an hour Gumilyov joined the search. When eventually the boot was found, the duel had become psychologically impossible, and both participants agreed on a truce. Gumilyov was still angry with Voloshin and broke off all contact until a few months before his death in 1921, when he visited Voloshin and restored their friendship.

And here Wikepedia is also not quite right. The duel did happen. Gumilyov shot first, but missed. Voloshin's pistol misfired. He proposed to end the duel, but Gumilyov insisted that Voloshin has to shoot. After the second misfire, Gumilyov demanded that Voloshin attempt for the third time, but it was against the rules and only then the duel was stopped. Later, Voloshin confessed that he simply didn't know how to shoot...

Gumilyov was executed by Cheka in 1921. Voloshin lived till 1932, when he died peacefully.

Yelizaveta Dmitrieva wrote later to Voloshin: "Cherubina has never been a game for me. Cherubina was my birth, but, alas, it was a stillbirth." She became interested in theosophy. After the revolution she was exiled to Yekaterinodar (modern Krasnodar). In 1922 she was allowed to return to St.Petersburg, but in 1926 she was exiled again, this time to Tashkent. In 1927 she wrote her last literary mystification, a cycle of poems "House under the Peach Tree", under the pseudonym Li Xiang Tzu.

1928

19 years after the duel, on the same day, 5 December, Lila Dmitrieva died in Tashkent of cancer.

In 2008, a playwright from New York Paul Cohen wrote a play Cherubina. It was staged in Sanford Meisner Theater. The Village Voice wasn't really impressed with the play, but NYTheater.com wrote:

Cherubina is one of the most entertaining and well-crafted new plays I've seen this season. I highly recommend it!

And, finally, a large quotation from the Dictionary of Russian Women Writers by Marina Ledkovskaia-Astman et al.:

'DE GABRIAK, Cherubina' (Elizaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva; 'E. Li,' 'D. [also E. and V.| Arkasova1; m. Vasil'eva; b. Mar. 31, 1887. SPb; d. Dec. 5, 1928, Tashkent). Poet, prose writer, dramatist, and translator.

Although the author of a large body of lyric poetry, Dmitrieva is remembered primarily for the two dozen poems that she published as 'Cherubina de Gabriak' in the years 1909-10. In some ways she emerges as a rather tragic illustration of how much Silver Age interest in women's creativity sometimes depended on personal image.

Though belonging to the noble estate, her parents were low-paid professionals: her father a schoolteacher and her mother a midwife. Between the ages of seven and sixteen, Dmitrieva was bedridden with tuberculosis, which left her crippled. Despite illness, she managed to graduate from a gymnasium in 1904 and went on to study at the university level, specializing in Romance languages and history. She then taught for a year at a gymnasium before studying abroad in France and Germany.

Dmitrieva's literary career began in 1908 with the publication of her translations from Spanish religious poetry in the Messenger of Theosophy (Vestnik teosofii). (She had joined the Russian Anthroposophical Society in 1908.) In 1909 her poetry was rejected by S. Makovskii, editor of the new journal Apollo (Apollon). The fiction of 'Cherubina' began in the summer of that year when Dmitrieva paid a visit to Maksimilian Voloshin's villa at Koktebel' on the Black Sea. There the two made plans to submit her poems to Apollo under the pseudonym 'Cherubina de Gabriak.' In October 1909, Apollo printed a cycle of twelve de Gabriak poems. Dmitrieva became a succes de scandale, yet no one suspected her true identity. Her eventual unmasking the following month led to a major row: most angry of all was the young poet Nikolai Gumilev, who was to marry Anna Akhmatova the next year, but who was Voloshin's rival for Dmitrieva's affections at the time. After Gumilev publicly insulted Dmitrieva in the crudest sexual terms, he and Voloshin fought a duel. Fortunately no serious mishap ensued. Yet in September of the next year Apollo published a cycle of fifteen poems by 'de Gabriak'; these were immediately followed by a poem printed under her real name. The affair of 'Cherubina' made Dmitrieva, for a short while, more notorious than any other woman poet of her day. In 1911 Dmitrieva, along with her new husband, Vsevolod Vasil'ev, an engineer, left St. Petersburg for Turkestan. She maintained contact with SPb. and M. mystic circles and now devoted herself to anthroposophy. In a letter of 1910, Dmitrieva announced to Voloshin: "I shall not publish anything more; my ego—as an artist—has died." It was not until 1915 that a new creative streak which she described in her "Autobiography" as "a new Cherubina," was to overtake her. By 1918, Dmitrieva had settled in Krasnodar, where in 1920 she began to work with the playwright Samuil Marshak. Together they created a center for homeless children and a children's theater for which they wrote plays. In 1922 they returned to Petrograd, where Marshak headed up the Theater for Young Spectators, assisted by Dmitrieva. She also published prose for children.

In 1927 Dmitrieva was arrested and exiled to Tashkent, probably because of her link with anthroposophy. Before she died in 1928, Dmitrieva composed a cycle of philosophical poems entitled "House under the Pear Tree" (Domik pod grushevym derevom), which remained unpublished until 1988.

The 'Cherubina' incident was to be used by Liubov' Gurevich (in Estetika i kul'tura) as an illustration of the decadent trend's self-advertising excesses. There was some justice in this. The runaway success of 'Cherubina's' verse was partly due to its pandering to snobbery (see, for example, "Our Coat of Arms"); the Hispanophilia which swept over Europe in the years before World War I also played a role. In stylistic terms, the poetry was not particularly original. The setting is typically Symbolist in its lack of definition; references to cultural objects are given in terms of the most banal generalities. The lexicon runs the conventional Decadent gamut of solitude, stars, darkness, doomed beaty and corruption, reusing such Gippius-like rhyme combinations as "shroud/blood" (pokrov/krov'). 'Cherubina' also used fashionable "imported" poetic forms such as the rondeau and the French chain verse ("The Golden Bough").

What does give 'Cherubina's' poetry a more than ephemeral significance is the complex feminine psychology which it delineates. These verses achieve a clever fusion of the Decadent female persona, as it had earlier been developed by Mariia Bashkirtseva in her diary, Mirra Lokhvitskaia in poetry, and Lidiia Zinov'eva-Annibal in prose, with a Catholic religiosity drawing partly on French Symbolism and partly- on Dmitrieva's reading of the Counter-Reformational mystics St. Teresa and St. Ignatius Loyola. Reflecting its Symbolist background,

this work at the same time transformed it. A variety of doubles appears in the poems; identity is more fluid than in the dualistic representations of femininity preferred by Symbolism, possibly a result of Dmitrieva's anthroposophical ideals. The lexicon might be Gippius', but the chief actor was now a woman, not Gippius' male speaker; Gabriak's use of Catholic mysticism was a feminized equivalent of Viacheslav Ivanov's borrowings from Italian medieval tradition. Gabriak established a precedent for the use of a female persona in mystical poetry, a fact that was to become very important with mystical poetry's growing significance, during the 1920s and 1930s, as a genre practiced by women in external and internal emigration from Soviet official culture (e.g., Kuz'mina-Karavaeva and Akhmatova).

The 'Cherubina' affair appears also to have aided Dmitrieva's own development as a poet. In her early poems, what coherent voice she has is imitative. In those written after 1915, a stronger individuality develops, and most striking of all are the poems which Dmitrieva wrote in her Tashkent exile. At times, as in "The Willows" (Ivy), the simple lexicon and flexibility of metrics anticipate Akhmatova's practice in the 1930s and 1940s. Her poetry, like that of Sofiia Pamok, Vera Merkur'eva, Adelaida Gertsyk, or Akhmatova herself, is indicative of the very high literary quality achieved by Russian women in internal emigration.

Update @2008-12-06: I've added the story of the name Cherubina and fixed the Wikipedia article.

Other blogs: languagehat on languages in 19th century Russia

2008-12-05T06:12:00.005Z

One more favorite blog of mine is Languagehat. Today, he writes about the use of the French language in the early 19th century in Russia, about the decline of Russian language among the aristocrats and what happened that reversed the situation. He quotes Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes:

Princess Dashkova, a vocal advocate of Russian culture and the only female president ever of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had the finest European education. 'We were instructed in four different languages, and spoke French fluently,' she wrote in her memoirs, 'but my Russian was extremely poor.' Count Karl Nesselrode, a Baltic German and Russia's foreign minister from 1815 to 1856, could not write or even speak the language of the country he was meant to represent. French was the language of high society, and in high-born families the language of all personal relationships as well. The Volkonskys, for example, a family whose fortunes we shall follow in this book, spoke mainly French among themselves. Mademoiselle Callame, a French governess in the Volkonsky household, recalled that in nearly fifty years of service she never heard the Volkonskys speak a word of Russian, except to give orders to the domestic staff. This was true even of Maria (née Raevskaya), the wife of Prince Sergei Volkonsky, Tsar Alexander's favourite aide-de-camp in 1812. Despite the fact that she had been brought up in the Ukrainian provinces, where noble families were more inclined to speak their native Russian tongue, Maria could not write in Russian properly. Her letters to her husband were in French. Her spoken Russian, which she had picked up from the servants, was very primitive and full of peasant slang. It was a common paradox that the most refined and cultured Russians could speak only the peasant form of Russian which they had learnt from the servants as children...

This neglect of the Russian language was most pronounced and persistent in the highest echelons of the aristocracy, which had always been the most Europeanized (and in more than a few cases of foreign origin). In some families children were forbidden to speak Russian except on Sundays and religious holidays. During her entire education Princess Ekaterina Golitsyn had only seven lessons in her native tongue. Her mother was contemptuous of Russian literature and thought Gogol was 'for the coachmen'. The Golitsyn children had a French governess and, if she ever caught them speaking Russian, she would punish them by tying a red cloth in the shape of a devil's tongue around their necks. Anna Lelong had a similar experience at the Girls' Gymnasium, the best school for noble daughters in Moscow. Those girls caught speaking Russian were made to wear a red tin bell all day and stand like dunces, stripped of their white aprons, in the corner of the class; they were forced to remain standing even during meals, and received their food last. Other children were even more severely punished if they spoke Russian—sometimes even locked in a room. The attitude seems to have been that Russian, like the Devil, should be beaten out of noble children from an early age, and that even the most childish feelings had to be expressed in a foreign tongue.

See more quotations from Figes at Languagehat.

Public opinion poll on Russian history

2008-12-03T09:32:00.002Z

A couple of weeks ago VTsIOM (the public opinion study center) asked Russian citizens whether they support the rehabilitation of the royal family and what political figures of the early 20th century they like and dislike. The full results of the poll are here (in Russian). The results are interesting, especially when compared with the similar poll held in 2005. I will give some excerpts below with comments.

"The Presidium of the Supreme court has recently rehabilitated Nikolay II and the members of his family. Do you agree with the decision?" 27% said that they agree completely. 42% mostly agree. 9% mostly disagree. 2% completely disagree. 19% gave no answer. But the most interesting part is the breakdown by political position of the respondents. 17% of communists completely agreed with the decision of the court and 36% more said that they mostly agree. It gives us the 53% support of the rehabilitation of Romanovs among communists! Supporters of other political parties gave even more positive answers, but the sheer number of the communists who are ready to make peace with Romanovs after all, is very interesting. On the one hand, it may demonstrate the common sense of modern communists, but on the other hand, it might be an indicator of the transformation of the communist party into something like national-socialist one. The downside of patriotism is that generally it's an effective brain inhibitor.

The last table is the most informative, IMHO. "What do you feel toward the following people:"

Name	2005	2008
Bukharin:
Like	23	21
Dislike	25	22
Dzerzhinsky:
Like	44	40
Dislike	28	24
Kerensky:
Like	14	16
Dislike	44	36
Kolchak:
Like	20	32
Dislike	41	30
Lenin:
Like	50	42
Dislike	32	30
Makhno:
Like	13	18
Dislike	55	45
Milyukov:
Like	7	10
Dislike	32	29
Denikin:
Like	26	23
Dislike	39	32
Nikolay II:
Like	42	44
Dislike	28	22
Stalin:
Like	37	28
Dislike	47	48
Trotsky:
Like	16	18
Dislike	45	39

The first thing that attracts attention is, of course, still considerable, but notably decreasing sympathy to Stalin and Lenin. The number of those who dislike them, however, remained almost the same.

The most striking change has happened in these three years to Kolchak and Makhno. The number of Kolchak's sympathizers has grown by half: from 20% to 32%. The number of those who dislike him has decreased by 25%: from 41% to 30%. The proportions of changes in public opinion of Nestor Makhno are about the same, but the absolute numbers are smaller. The most obvious causes of the changes were, of course, two movies: the series The Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno (2006) and this year's hit, sugar-sweet romantic story Admiral.

Another shift, but the one that doesn't strike the eye, is the significant decrease of the opponents of Kerensky and Denikin. To tell you the truth, I cannot explain it. A side-effect of that Admiral movie, could be?

Note also the large number of people who had no opinion on Bukharin and Milyukov. These two figures are the least known in the list.

Generally, I might call the results "inspiring" :).

December History Blog Carnival

2008-12-03T07:28:00.000Z

Frog in a Well - The Japan History Group Blog, is hosting the History Blog Carnival this month. December 2008 History Carnival covers some recent events, including the elections in the USA and the financial crisis, from the point of view of history. My recent post on the 1908 US elections and the 1933 crisis is also mentioned. Thanks to the authors for the link.

Other topics of the carnival are: women in history, history of the Far East (China and Korea), history of the trans-Atlantic links and a little bit more.

En passant: answer to Larussophobe

2008-12-02T06:41:00.004Z

It seems that I was unlucky enough to attract the attention of someone who runs a blog named Larussophobe (which does not appear in my blogroll). The author has read my recent post written after a visit to a local bookstore. The article at Larussophobe sums up to the following: a) I am a thief because I steal books; b) I see no connection between violation of intellectual property and the price of books; c) (quite unexpectedly) I am a stupid coward because I do not go and start a guerilla against Putin's tyranny.

I sometimes flatter myself with the thought that there's a share of my efforts in the fall of the USSR, because many years ago I participated in the anti-Soviet movement. It was only a tiny share, but still I cannot blame myself for doing nothing. I did not really oppose socialism per se, I didn't like the atmospere of lie, deception and concealment. Having read the article of Larussophobe, I have an impression that I am in the USSR. The author ascribes to me some statements of his own and attacks the strawman with the energy of a well-trained Soviet journalist. Unlike Soviet journalists, though, Larussophobe is anonymous.

We may have different ideas on what is theft, but even from the point of view of the most active proponents of intellectual property I am hardly a thief. The last books I have read are the works of Jack London, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ivan Yefremov, Ivan Goncharov and other authors whose works are in public domain. There was also a book by Neil Gaiman whose novel I found too boring to pay for it. Theft? You may call it so, but I would not feel sympathy to poor writers. Let me quote the Egyptian Nights by Alexander Pushkin:

The calling of poet does not exist in our country. Our poets do not receive the patronage of men of quality: our poets are men of quality themselves, and if any Maecenas (devil take them all!) should fail to realize this, so much the worse for him. With us there are no tattered abbés whom a composer might pick up on a street corner to write a libretto. With us, poets do not walk door to door soliciting donations.

In a similar fashion, I write here for free. Unlike Larussophobe, I find it shameful to receive money for writing about history or politics. My salary may be small by Larussophobe's standards, but I earn it with my brain, to the last cent. And I don't make money on politics. I do write about politics, too, and I did criticize the ways of the Putin's Russia more than once. Larussophobe has even made some money by quoting me before. No, I would not call him a thief. But he is not an honorable man.

So, who is a stupid coward, me or the anonymous venal journalist who writes Soviet-style propaganda under nom de plume Larussophobe? Dismissed and forgotten.

PS: Oh, and by the way, I have finally bought A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People by Steven Ozment and Histoire de L'Italie by Katherine Brice :)

Porvoo cathedral

2008-12-01T13:13:00.003Z

Finnish radio YLE reports that after two years of restoration works the Porvoo cathedral was reconcecrated and open for public.

In 2006, 18-year-old Kalle Johan Ernesti Holm burned the cathedral and was sentenced to three months in jail.

In 1809 Finland became a semi-autonomous part of the Russian empire and the Porvoo Diet convened in this cathedral:

Between March 25 and July 19, 1809 the four Estates of occupied Finland (Nobility, Clergy, Burghers and Peasants) were assembled at Porvoo (Borgå) by Tsar Alexander I, the new Grand Duke of Finland. The central event at Porvoo was the sovereign pledge and the oaths of the Estates in Porvoo Cathedral on March 29. Each of the Estates swore their oaths of allegiance, committing themselves to accepting the Emperor and Grand Duke of Finland as the true authority, and to keeping the Constitution and the form of government unchanged. Alexander I subsequently promised to govern Finland in accordance with its laws.

The events of 1809 are considered to have been more important for the independence of Finland than the official recognition of the independence in 1917: From Helsingin Sanomat:

"Of course I take a slightly reserved stand on the 2017 side of things. From the Finnish perspective, 1809 is a more significant milestone than 1917, when the declaration came and the fledgling state waited to see if any other countries would acknowledge Finland's sovereignty and independent existence", says Klinge.
"In fact, if we are really scientific about it, the changes that took place in 1917 were of a much lower order of magnitude than those of 1809", he goes on.

A bronze statue of emperor Alexander I, made in 1909 by Walter Runeberg, is still standing in the cathedral.

Other blogs: Soviet Zion and math teaching in USSR

2008-12-01T07:31:00.008Z

Always entertaining and educating blog Strange Maps writes about "Stalin's Siberian Zion" – the Jewish Autonomous Region in Siberia. To make things more interesting I have collected the results of population censuses:

Year:	Total population of JAR:	Jewish population of JAR:	Total population of Russia (thousands):	Jewish population of Russia: (thousands)
1937	76,500	18,000
1939	108,915	17,695	108262	891
1959	162,856	14,269	117534	855
1970	172,449	11,452	130079	792
1979	188,710	10,166	137410	692
1989	214,085	8,887	147022	537
2002	190,915	2,329	145167	230

So, nowadays the percentage of Jewish population in Jewish autonomous region is about the same as across Russia

The figure below represents the decrease of the population of some ethnic minorities in Russia. Orange line is Jews, green line is Germans and blue line is Ukrainians (1989 is 100%).

I just have to add that the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia questioned these results. They say that the Jewish population in Russia is at least six times larger. The specialists from the Jerusalem university, though, replied that the number of Jews in Russia may be about twice as large as the result of the census (that is, about 500,000), but hardly much more.

God Plays Dice is a blog about mathematics. Yesterday, the author posted a link to an article in Journal of Mathematical Behavior, written by Andrei Toom: A Russian Teacher in America (PDF). Mr. Toom makes some statements about the attitude of American students and compares it with the attitudes of the students he taught in the USSR. He admits that he has "very little experience with the bulk of the Russian population", since most of his students in Moscow "were children of intellectuals, because in Russia a much smaller percentage of youngsters than in US go into higher education".

I have no figures at hand, but according to this article, "Russia also had one of the highest shares of population with tertiary education (over 50 percent)". Does anyone know the exact figures for Russia and USA?

PS: the difference is that in the USA the salary of the people with higher education grows faster, while in Russia it's the other way round :)

November 24 in Russian history. Duel of the four. Griboyedov and Chavchavadze

2008-11-24T17:28:00.005Z

(12 November Old Style)

One of the first articles I wrote here mentioned Avdotya Istomina, famous ballerina. Here's a story where she became the cause of one of the most famous duels in Russian history.

1817

Istomina was eighteen and she was beautiful. Well, you see her portrait and it would be better to say that she was considered beautiful, for some reason. Like many other eighteen-years old beauties, she was frivolous, puerile and a little bit cruel. By that time she had been living with 21-years old captain of cavalry of the Horse-Guardsmen Regiment Count Vasily Sheremetev. Sheremetev was hot-tempered and jealous. On 3 November 1817, Avdotya left him and moved to live with Maria Azarevicheva, her good friend. What caused this break-up is not known. Perhaps, it was just another scandal. She told later that she had planned to leave him for a long time. Rumors said that the young count was running out of money. On 5 November, one of her numerous acquantances, Alexander Griboyedov (the author of the magnificent play Woe From Wit), after an evening in the theatre, offered her to visit his good friend, Count Shakhovsky, who had something to do with the show business (the theater, ballet, and so on). Instead, he brought her to his friend Count Alexander Zavadovsky, kammerjunker (Gentleman of the Bedchamber). Griboyedov explained later that he just wanted to find out what happened between her and Sheremetev, but since he lived at Zavadovsky's, it was the only place where they could talk, and Zavadovsky arrived later.

When Zavadovsky came back, he, an egotistic playboy, thought that, of course, she must have come to see him. Later, during the investigation, Istomina confessed that during this evening Zavadovsky had offered her his love, but she didn't know whether he was serious or not. Something went wrong, so she left disappointed Zavadovsky and Griboyedov took her back to Azarevicheva's apartment. Soon Sheremetev came there, begged her to pardon him for his jealousy and then they departed to Sheremetev's. When they came back, though, he started inquiring where she had been, with whom, what did they talk about and what did they do and so on. When he finally learned that she payed a visit to Zavadovsky, he went mad. His friend, cornet of Life-Guard Alexander Yakubovich, being just as zippy as Sheremetev, convinced Sheremetev that Griboyedov was also guilty, that he had played the role of a pander in this affair. Yakubovich also told later that the cause of the duel between Sheremetev and Zavadovsky was some ungentlemanlike act of Zavadovsky, but refused to tell what it was, saying that he promised to Sheremetev not to disclose this matter.

On 9 November, at 4pm, they came to Zavadovsky and challenged him to shoot right now. Zavadovsky asked them to wait for a couple of hours, because he hadn't yet had his dinner, so they decided to postpone the duel to tomorrow, 10 November. Friend of Zavadovsky, second lieutenant of artillery baron Stroganov tried to reconcile the duellists, but failed. On the next day the place for the duel was not yet agreed upon, so they postponed all deaths till 11 November. On 11 November, it was snowing and windy and the duel was delayed again. On 12 November they came to the Volkovo cemetary. The distance was 18 steps and they agreed that the one who shoots first will have to come to the barrier in the middle.

Sheremetev, annoyed by Zavadovsky's lentitude, shot first, but the bullet only tore away a piece of Zavadovsky's collar. Sheremetev cursed and said that if Zavadovsky would miss, they will shoot again. Zavadovsky took aim for a long time, then his pistol misfired, then it misfired again, and finally he shot. The bullet hit Sheremetev in the belly. The duel between Yakubovich and Griboyedov was postponed and they took wounded Sheremetev to his home where he died on the next day.

Sheremetev's father asked emperor Alexander not to punish Zavadovsky. The emperor gave an audience to Zavadovsky and concluded that it was a lawful self-defense.

Playboy Zavadovsky was sent away from Russia. Yakubovich was arrested and transferred to Caucasus. Griboyedov was also sent away from Russia. He was offered a choice: he could join the Russian embassy in the USA or in Persia. He chose Persia. On his way there, in Tiflis, Griboyedov met Yakubovich and the postponed duel took place. The bullet of Yakubovich hit Griboyedov into his palm, damaging forever his pinkie. "At least, he'll stop playing piano", said the implacable Yakubovich.

Griboyedov became a good diplomat, he often came back to Russia and then returned to Persia to continue his work. In 1828, on his way from Russia to Tehran, he stopped in Tiflis again. There he met the beautiful Georgian duchess Nina Chavchavadze, daughter of his good friend, poet Alexander Chavchavadze, and fell in love with her, just like she did. They married and the happy couple went to Tehran. A week later Nina stayed in the city Tavriz on the border and Griboyedov went forward to prepare his apartments for the arrival of his lady.

There was an Armenian eunuch in Griboyedov's retinue, Mirza Yakub, and the rumors said that he planned to convert from islam to christianity. The leaders of the Tehran muslims decided to kill the apostate. The fanatics attacked the Russian embassy and killed everyone there. The body of Griboyedov was identified by the mutilated pinkie.

More about Griboyedov in a small, but well written article by Philip Henscher in the Spectator: The playing fields of Persia, review of "Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran: Alexander Griboyedov and Imperial Russia's Mission to the Shah of Persia" by Laurence Kelly

From bookstores

2008-11-24T10:09:00.003Z

My family's gone to Moscow for some days and I feel a little bit lost and forgotten :). Probably, this is why I decided to take a walk to a nearby bookstore. It's been quite some time since I was there. Could be six or seven months, I think. The reason for this neglect was not that I quit reading. Quite the contrary. In April, I received a gift from my wife. It was an electronic book, called LBook. LBook is, actually, yet another brand name for the device generally known as Hanlin eReader. LBook is distributed by the Ukrainian company MUK. In some other countries the device is known under other names: Walkbook, papyre, BeBook, EZ Reader or just Hanlin eReader. To see how it works, check this video at YouTube. My LBook works even better, because it runs firmware, modified by some Russian enthusiasts, so, unlike the original Hanlin, it renders HTML, CHM and Epub in a quite readable way.

So, back to the story. I came to the bookstore, hoping to find some synoptic history of Germany and Italy. I did find a couple of books, Histoire de l'Italie by Katherine Brice and Kleine Deutshe Geschichte by Ulrich Herrmann, Andreas Gestrich, Ulf Dirlemeier et al. I had a look at the prices and put the books back to the shelf. $13-16 for a book is a little bit more that what I hoped to spend. Then I found another great book. It was La civilisation de L'europe des Lumieres by Pierre Chaunu. I checked the table of content, browsed through some pages and was ready to run for the cashdesk, when I saw the price. I used to buy the books from this series, like The Byzantine Civilization by Andre Guillou (I wrote about the book before) or the Civilization of Renaissance by Jean Delumeau or The Civilization of the Classic Islam by Dominique and Janine Sourdel and they cost me about $10 (250 rubles). But that last book costs 650 rubles! Even now that RUR/USD rate has plunged from 24 to 27 rubles, it's still 24 dollars, which is more than 3% of my monthly salary. So, I had to place it back ruefully.

No, I didn't just go away empty-handed. I bought a copy of The course of Russian history of 19th century by Alexander Kornilov. He was another historian from those last free thinkers who worked in the early 20th century, like Sergey Platonov or Dmitri Ilovaisky or Vasily Klyuchevsky. A great book. I'm afraid that we won't see a comparable work on 20th century for a very long time. Not from the Russian historians, sorry.

Now, some conclusions. Firstly, Russian business is Russian business, the prices go only one way, up and up. In the 1990s the sellers used to say: "Of course, the prices grow. You know, the dollar's rising", or "Of course, the prices grow. You know, the dollar's falling". No matter what, they said it with the most sincere faces and the expression of deepest conviction. I'm sure that now they will tell us: "Of course, the prices grow. You know, deflation..."

Secondly, once again I thank the Ukrainian sellers of that ebook device, my wife and so called "pirates", who scan books and make them available to those who can't catch up with the prices. Taking into account the digits I saw today, my LBook has already payed off its cost in six months.

Update: (2008-12-02 11:28:42) Follow-up: En passant: answer to Larussophobe

November 23 in Russian history. The man who raised Soviet children

2008-11-23T15:46:00.002Z

1908

One hundred years ago Nikolay Nosov was born in Kiev. He wrote many children's books, read by hundreds of millions of Soviet children for decades. Those who haven't read his stories about Neznaika, heard the audio recordings or (in the late Soviet years) saw animated films. The trilogy about Neznaika, Vitya Maleev at School and at Home and short stories are his best known books.

You can find the full text of the first book about Neznaika here: The Adventures of Neznaika and His Friends. See also a very brief review of the trilogy here: Nikolay Nosov: Neznaika trilogy. The author of the review, Layla AbdelRahim, qualifies the books in the following way: the first book is a socialist anarchist utopia of Flower town, the second, Dunno in Sun City, reminds one of the communist state and the third one, Dunno on the Moon, describes harsh realities of the capitalist society on the moon. This is true, but this is not why we loved the books. I recall one of my friends (we were, probably, 7 or 8 years old then), who had borrowed my copy of all three books (and they were not easy to buy in the USSR!), once whispered to me in a conspiratorial way: "You know what? The third book is about America!". Well, we didn't like the way people lived on the capitalist Moon, but the books were incredibly popular. Most of all I loved the second one, about the communist Sun City :).

As for the other books, I strongly advice that you check the translations of some short stories by Nikolay Nosov made by Svet from Windows to Russia:

ZIS
Cucumbers
The crucian carp
The crucian carp (part 2)
Mishka's porridge
Mishka's porridge (part 2)
The Pistol
The Pistol (part 2)
Gardeners
Garderners (part 2)
Rat-Rat-Rat
Laddy
Laddy (part 2)

November 22 in Russian history. Death of Mikhail Yaroslavich, nephew of Nevsky

2008-11-22T10:49:00.003Z

1318.

In the chapter on the rise of Muscovy, Sergey Platonov wrote:

The two first knyazes, Daniil Alexandrovich and his son Yuri, took the lands along the whole river Moscow, tearing the towns Kolomna from the Ryazan principality and Mozhaisk from Smolensk principality. Also, Daniil inherited Pereyaslavl-Zalessky from the childless knyaz of Pereyaslavl. Yuri Daniilovich became so influential that he decided to ask the Golden Horde for yarlyk to become the grand knyaz of Vladimir, competing with the knyaz of Tver Mikhail Yaroslavich (Mikhail was a nephew of Alexander Nevsky and an uncle of Yuri Daniilovich). Since the political struggle in the Horde was led by all means, including conspiracies and violence, both knyazes were murdered in the Horde.

The principality of Vladimir was about 3-3.5 times larger than the duchies of Tver or Moscow. The owner of the title of knyaz of Vladimir became also the grand knyaz, the chief ruler among all the knyazes of the North-Eastern Rus. He defined the joint foreign policy and was the chief military commander in the case of war. Even the free principality of Novgorod recognized the grand knyaz as their supreme ruler. But to become the grand knyaz, one had to obtain the yarlyk from the khan of the Golden Horde. So, since the times of Alexander Nevsky Russian knyazes competed for the yarlyk. In the early 14th century the knyazes of Muscovy and Tver were the strongest candidates.

In 1304 the grand knyaz of Vladimir Andrey Alexandrovich, or Andrey of Gorodets, the third son of Alexander Nevsky, died. His three sons had already died and his heritage produced a huge turmoil among the other knyazes. As a matter of fact, he had bequeathed the principality of Vladimir to his cousin, Mikhail Yaroslavich of Tver. In 1305, Mikhail left to the Horde for the yarlyk.

Yuri Danilovich, knyaz of Muscovy, a grandson of Nevsky, might think he was very unlucky. His father, Daniil, died just one year earlier, 1303. Had Daniil lived a bit longer, the complicated laws of accession would make Yuri Danilovich the grand prince. He was not a legitimate candidate for the princedom, but his principality was stronger than Tver. So, he decided to interfere. As soon as Mikhail of Tver left to the Horde, Yuri followed him. The Moscow boyars and even the Maxim, the metropolitan of Vladimir, insisted that he should stay. He said that he goes to the Horde on his own business, having nothing to do with the yarlyk and departed for good.

When both of them arrived to the Horde, khan Tokhta, a very practical ruler of the Golden Horde, said that the yarlyk will go to the one who offers a larger tribute. Yuri and Mikhail raised the stakes till Yuri gave up. Mikhail stayed in the Horde for some more days, while Yuri hurried back to Moscow. Having arrived there, he immediately sent his army to Pereslavl Zalessky, a town that used to belong to the knyazes of Moscow, but recently adjoined to the domain of the grand knyaz of Vladimir. The excuse used by Yuri was that the deceased knyaz of Pereslavl was an old ally of Moscow. Legally, though, it was a treason and the army of Tver moved to Pereslavl. Mikhail, though, was still absent and Yuri defeated the Tverians. As a matter of fact, the Mongols had to interfere and restore the law. But they were not interested in the rise of one strong grand prince, so they left the two to solve their problems. Besides, who knows who of the princes might offer more money? Having returned to Tver, Mikhail attacked Moscow and forced Yuri to abandon Pereslavl.

But the competition was not over yet. Yuri's brothers, Alexander and Boris, refused to support him, but he still conflicted with Tver time to time, raided his neighbors and his rather aggressive policy increased the strength of Muscovy. In 1306 he killed the knyaz of Ryazan Konstantin, but failed to adjoin Ryazan and had to suffice with Kolomna. In 1307, Yuri attacked Nizhny Novgorod, conflicting with Mikhail once again. In 1308 Nizhny Novgorod Mikhail became the prince of Nizhny Novgorod, but Yuri did not give up. He found a good ally for himself – the new metropolitan of Russia, Peter. In 1312, when khan Tokhta died and khan Uzbek became the new khan of the Golden Horde, Mikhail of Tver went to the Horde to pledge allegiance to the new khan, and Yuri attacked Nizhny Novgorod, where the situation was very similar to what had happened in Pereslavl in 1305. Mikhail wanted to send his army, but the metropolitan Peter intefered and banned him from attacking Yuri.

Uzbek, rather annoyed by that little restless pain in the neck, demanded that Yuri visit him immediately. So, in 1315, the two swapped their places: Mikhail came back from the Horde, and Yuri came there to talk to Uzbek khan. Mikhail took back Nizhny Novgorod and was pretty sure that he could sleep well, even though the Novgorodians didn't like him and revolted now and then. But Yuri did not waste the time. He made acquaintance with Konchaka, the daughter of Uzbek khan and very soon married her. It was a great move. In 1317, Yuri came back to Rus with a large Mongol regiment, led by Kavgadiy, with Konchaka, who was baptised and got the name Agafya, and with the yarlyk of the grand knyaz!

Mikhail immediately made peace with Nizhny Novgorod and went with his army to meet Yuri. They met near Kostroma. Long and tiresome negotiations followed. It seems that Mikhail Yaroslavich agreed to give up his claims. He understood that Yuri will never leave him alone and upon his return to Tver he began to enforce the city and to train the army. The conflict ensued and in December 1317 Yuri attacked Tver but was defeated and fled to Novgorod (not Nizhny Novgorod, but Great Novgorod). Konchaka-Agafya, Yuri's brother Boris, many knyazes and even Kavgadiy were captured. Kavgadiy, though, was soon released with many gifts. Yuri gathered a new army in Novgorod and Pskov and returned to Tver, but this time there were no battles. The knyazes met and agreed to ask the Mongols to end their strife.

In theory, Mikhail had good chances to win. He was richer, he had good contacts in the Horde and he had better support in Russia. Right after the truce, he sent his son Konstantin to the Horde to make arrangements for the dispute.

Suddenly, still imprisoned Konchaka died. Yuri accused Mikhail of poisoning her and left to the Horde. Mikhail didn't plan to follow him, but soon a messenger from Uzbek khan arrived, demanding that Mikhail go with him. By the time Mikhail came to Uzbek, the khan had already learned from Yuri and Kavgadiy a lot about the "evil" deeds of the knyaz of Tver. The slander worked and Mikhail was put on trial. Kavgadiy was both the prosecutor and the judge. On 27 October Mikhail was put in chains and on the next day he was chained to a heavy log. After the trial that took place on 20 November, though, Kavgadiy promised him that he would be released soon. On 22 November 1318, 690 years ago, Kavgadiy, Yuri and a large group of their people assaulted Mikhail in his tent. They threw him down and started kicking him. Then someone Romanets fished out his knife and stabbed Mikhail in his heart.

His body was sent to Tver and on 6 September 1319 a huge crowd of people attended his funeral in the Tver cathedral. They were so frightened by his death that soon they forgot Mikhail's feuds with other knyazes, the ransack of the civilians in Torzhok in 1316, forgot how he had brought the Mongols and so on. They even began worshipping him as a saint.

In 1319-1320 this story was written by hegumen Alexander, Mikhail's father-confessor.

On 21 November 1325, almost exactly 7 years after the death of Mikhail, Yuri of Moscow was killed in the Golden Horde by Dimitri Mikhailovich, knyaz of Tver, son of Mikhail of Tver. Dimitri was also killed on spot.

To make the story just a little bit easier to read, here's the family tree of Rurikids, the Russian knyazes:

November 18 in Russian history. Ekaterinburg.

2008-11-18T10:02:00.002Z

1723

(7 November Old Style)

285th anniversary of Ekaterinburg, a legendary city near Urals mountains.

As it often happens, the date is conventional, but not totally arbitrary. The first village, Shartash, was founded there in 1642 by Starovery. Now a district of Ekaterinburg is called Shartash. In 1704 copper processing facilities were built on river Uktus. In 1720 Vasily Tatishchev inspected the facilities and proposed to relocate them to Shartash. In 1721 preparatory works began. The exact dates are not clear, but somewhere in January-March 1723 a regiment of soldiers arrived from Tobolsk and the construction works on the new factory were started. By November the first factory floors were ready and on 18 November the first two hammers were put to test. This day became the birthday of Ekaterinburg.

Since 1726 Ekaterinburg became the primary source of gemstones for the Russian Empire. In 1807 the city officially became the first and the only "mining city" and was granted certain freedoms and privileges.

The area was extremely rich in metals and gemstones: copper, gold, malachite, amethyst and all other kinds of quartz, agate, aquamarine, beryl and so on. When I was a boy, I was interested in geology and visited the a hobby group at the city Pioneers Palace. By the way, these palaces were a wonderful thing, a brilliant invention of the Soviets. We had a very good teacher, geologist Yuri Melkozerov (two years ago by sheer chance I found his grave on the local cemetery :( ). I don't remember when exactly it was, perhaps in 1981-1983, we went to Ekaterinburg (it was called Sverdlovsk then, after Yakov Sverdlov). I brought from that trip a lot of interesting minerals: jasper, quartz, tiny garnets and many others. A piece of raw, uncut and unpolished malachite from that trip is stil lying right now on my table. As far as I remember, I was not deeply impressed by the city: it was just another industrial town, just like Samara, a bit dirty, with its own little attractions, but the nature of the Urals was magnificent.

Ekaterinburg was the home town of Pavel Bazhov, Russian writer. In childhood, he lived not far from Ekaterinburg, in a little town called Polevskoy. In 1939 he published his wonderful collection of Urals legends and fairy-tales, The Malachite Casket. These legends are absolutely different from any other folk tales. They somehow remind of Die Bergwerke zu Falun (The Falun Mines) by E.T.A. Hoffmann, but at the same time they are in a class of their own. The stories of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain or the Stone Flower are just amazing. Unfortunately, they are written in such a vivid folk language that it's very difficult to translate them into English preserving the charms of the text. Anyway, here's a brief retelling of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain (please, disregard the awful pictures :)).

You can find some photos of Ekaterinburg here. The picture in the top was taken from here. Find more here and here.

Political mathematics

2008-11-17T09:46:00.003Z

How come the politicians find the most stupid explanations for their controversial decisions? Some years ago, when Putin abolished the governors' elections, he explained that it would make the anti-terror campaign more effective. Now, the presidential and the parliamentary terms have been increased to six and five years correspondingly. From Moscow Times:

The bill ensures a difference in time between the presidential and parliamentary elections, allowing for "calm preparations," United Russia's first deputy chairman, Vladimir Pekhtin, said in a statement released after the vote.

Does it take a PhD in mathematics to understand that no matter which integer M and N you take, the elections will coincide at least every M*N years? Is it that me and Grigori Perelman are the only Russians who understand that the only way to "ensure a difference in time between the elections" is to make the terms equal?

As if to make things even more hilarious, the bootlicks from the Liberal-Democratic party proposed to increase the presidential term to seven years. Sergey Ivanov, member of the State Duma, says (link in Russian) that "the proposed five and six years long terms will cause one electoral campaign to immediately blend into the other". I just want to know: HOW CAN A MAN BE THAT DUMB? It's an insult to human intelligence, in my opinion, the penalty for which should be 20 years in primary school, as a habitual idiot.

They say that those who know nothing, teach. Those who can't teach, manage. Seems like those who can't manage, become politicians. We just can't cope with them. Isolate them, somehow, or automatically proclaim invalid all laws approved by parliaments and adopt those they had declined, maybe?

Okay, I've heard about someone G.W.Bush and I assume that my compatriots are not really outstanding, but, please, I beg you, name just three politicians who would be brilliant enough to avoid such blunt errors?

Administrativia

2008-11-13T09:00:00.004Z

Dear readers, I have enabled the rating menu on this blog. There are some checkboxes at the end of every article. Please, click one of them when you've read an article. I hope, it will let me know what kind of articles you like best. Thank you :)

Russian and Soviet press on the outcome of the US elections and the financial crisis.

2008-11-12T10:04:00.003Z

5 November 1908

(From starosti.ru)

Newspaper Russkoye Slovo on the results of the 1908 elections in the USA, 100 years ago:

Taft was elected the president of the republic by the majority of one million voters.

The presidential campaign has ended with the victory of the republican party. Taft is elected the president. Taft is 50. He is a typical business-man who made a fast and diverse career. It's hard to name a profession where he hasn't tried his hand. He was a judge and a professor of law. He was the governor of the Philippines and the Secretary of War. Right before becoming a candidate in the presidential campaign, Taft traveled around the world. He visited Russia, too, and gained reputation of an ingenious diplomat, who was charged with the high mission of preparing the international agreements and various political combinations to mitigate probable complications on the Far East.

Taft is a "real politician" in the broadest sense of this word. He belongs to those Americans who consider practical and useful actions, trenching upon unscrupulousness.

Russkoye Slovo also reports from Tibet:

On 20 October a revolutionary movement sprang up in Tibet. 10,000 lamas totally defeated the Chinese. Amban asks the Chinese government for reinforcement and demands that dalai-lamas return to Tibet.

1933

In November, issue 13 of one of the best Soviet/Russian magazines, Vokrug Sveta, was published. Vokrug Sveta is still the oldest Russian magazine, printed since 1860. Wikipedia writes:

Vokrug sveta (Russian: Вокруг света, literally: "Around the World") is the oldest magazine in the Russian language still being published (and one of the biggest magazines in modern Russia). The first issue was printed in St. Petersburg in December 1860, almost thirty years before the establishment of the National Geographic Magazine. It is thus one of the oldest popular science magazines in the world.

The magazine was conceived by a Warsaw-born entrepreneur, Boleslaw Wolf, who defined Vokrug Sveta as a lavishly illustrated yearly publication dedicated to "physical geography, natural sciences, the most recent discoveries, inventions, and observations".[1] Its roster of authors included Alfred Brehm, Camille Flammarion, Nikolai Przhevalsky, and Nikolay Miklukho-Maklay.

The Wolf edition was discontinued after 1868 for unclear reasons[2], but the project of a popular geographical journal was revived in 1885 by Ivan Sytin, a printer who directed his periodicals toward a wider audience. Sytin's Vokrug sveta was issued monthly and featured original translations of popular adventure fiction from such authors as Jules Verne, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Russian Revolution brought this period of the magazine's history to an abrupt termination. Like every other periodical of Imperial Russia, Vokrug sveta suspended publication for ten years. It was back in print under the auspices of the Young Communist League, specifically targeted toward the youth audience. Contributing editors included some of the finest Soviet science fiction authors, including Vladimir Obruchev and Ivan Yefremov. In 1938, the magazine's headquarters relocated from Leningrad to Moscow, and its publication was altogether suspended during World War II.

For Soviet readers, Vokrug sveta represented a rare source of authentic, fully-illustrated information about foreign cultural attractions. Unsurprisingly, the Komsomol bosses insisted that the magazine cover domestic tourist attractions rather than those situated outside the USSR.[3] In the 1960s and 1970s, the magazine continued to grow in popularity and increased the circulation to 2,300,000 copies by 1971. A television subsidiary was also popular, particularly in the early 1990s. As of 2007, Vokrug sveta ranks third among Russia's popular monthlies, with a circulation hovering around 250,000. The free archives of past issues (starting from 1970) are available on their website.

I always loved this magazine, but only recently found some old issues from 1928-1933. This issue, number 13, 1933, begins with a story titled in the best Soviet traditions: The Two Worlds. Below is a translation of some excerpts.

When sixteen years ago the socialist revolution of the Russian proletariat won, the dogs and pigs of the bourgeois society (note a reference to Pink Floyd here. DM) insisted stubbornly that the proletariat is able to destroy only, but cannot build something new. When the Soviet country after the civil war set a task of creating the economic basis for the classless socialist society, the theoreticians of the bourgeois society proclaimed our plan was a delirium, a utopia.

The results of the five-year plan have demonstrated that the capitalist system is ineffective, that it is dying. The new industrial regions have changed the map of our country. From an agrarian country, Russia turned into an industrial one, and the socialist industry is the only kind of our industry. The collectivisation has made our country the country with the largest agriculture in the world. Millions of workers are now building the classless socialist society.

This is what we've got. And what have they got?

They have the mortification of industry, and we have an unprecedented industrial growth. They have the degeneration of culture, and we have the propspering new socialist culture. We read in the newspapers: "The White Sea channel. Not just an industrial victory. The victory of the man over the dirt within, the dirt brought by the repellent capitalist reality. A cast-off, a pariah, a thief today brings his dream to life: through labor – to become a man, a surgeon, an engineer, a writer.

The flight of the aerostat. The world record of altitude. Oh, the glory of science and creation! And it dances in our blood even stronger when we recall that, probably, right now Einstein in his exile is reading yet another poison-pen written by a blackguarding fascist: "We will kill you, Jew".

The distant sands of Kara-Kum desert and the march of our cars there. Ours! From our Soviet Detroit, which will never close its doors and fire the workers, but instead will increase the production, inspired by the victory of the quality!

The world conference on physics in USSR. The storm of the atomic nucleus! Solving the mysteries of the matter! New victories of the materialism that does not burn in the Hitler's fires and does not drown in blood and dirt.

But let us remember: "The class of exploiters will not give up other than after a desperate, merciless fight" (V.Lenin).

Of all the industries of the capitalism only one is not in crisis – the military industry. The shares of the military enterprises started growing after Germany quitted the League of Nations. Of all the arts only the art of square-bashing and nationalist chauvinism keeps clanking its armor.

The fascism is the most concentrated representation of the attempt of the exploiters to solve the controversies of the capitalism by a new war, directed against the conquering socialism.

"We will die under Verdun, but we will never give up!" – with these words in prose and in verses, in movies and in songs, the German militarists brain-wash the German people.

Elevators with wheat burn in Chicago! The trader at the exchange nervously clutches the phone receiver, then relaxes and orders: "Do not extinguish the fire! Glory to the all-destroying fire! Perhaps, it will help to keep the prices higher." Oh, how many thousands of the working families could live on this wheat! Have you got money? No? Go away, then.

The salt waves of the Atlantic are licking fresh cream. Thousands of tanks with good milk are standing on the ocean shore. A milk trader is disposing of the surplus of milk, as it is appropriate in the times of a crisis. "This baby needs milk. Go buy some at the market" says an equanimous doctor, looking at dying baby in rags. You've got no money? Then you'll die, you little scion of the miners. Alas, babe, the ocean has drunk you portion of milk.

What strong, healthy, beautiful sportsmen live in the sunny California! The umpire gives a signal and the strong hands throw white balls and the skittles fall, hit by... the eggs! Hundred after hundred, thousand after thousand. At least, the eggs market can sleep well, the surplus has been eliminated.

All these are not our fantasies, these are the stories from the bourgeois press. This is the reality of the devastating world economic crisis, the strongest and deepest ever.

The fable about the capitalist "prosperity" has burst like a bubble. Industry and agriculture are intertwined in the crisis. All the controversies of the rotting capitalist system are layed bare. The bourgeoisie has developed the productive forces so strong that it cannot control them anymore. Ford has cut the production in Detroit. The English bourgeois economist Bowker is terrified by the lamentable situation in Liverpool, Mahchester and the surrounding regions. The export of fabrics, the key part of the English export, has dropped. The sea port in Hamburg looks like a huge cemetary. "From electricity we are moving back, to the civilization of dried gudgeons," writes the Warsaw newspaper Rabotnik. "The railroads are displaced by buses, the buses are displaced by horses, boats and human feet. In rich Poland the peasants of Polesye light their houses with the candles made of dried gudgeons."

Only recently, the bourgeois enterpreneurs dreamed of building an electric "Pan-Europe", interlinked by the copper wires. But the private monopolies fought for the markets and "spheres of influence" and now – the gudgeons.

The capitalist world is moving back, to the Middle Ages, under the strokes of crisis. The prophecies of the Marx's Das Kapital come true: "The monopoly of the capital becomes the fetters of the mode of production it has fostered and brought to the peak. The centralization of the means of production becomes incompatible with the capitalism. The end of the capitalist private property is nigh!"

The world economic crisis gave birth to the crisis of the culture. The technics and science are not worshipped anymore. A French writer Georges Duhamel offered to ban all inventions for some time. In Michigan, USA, the city authorities prohibited all machines in the road construction. A hoe and a pickaxe. American statisticians wave the figures, arguing that the potters and shoemakers in the Nero's Rome were happier than the modern people.

Science has fallen out of fashion. There are 8,000 unemployed teachers in New York alone. In New Jersey the people with higher education dig ditches. People with PhD degree sell goods in supermarkets: "Would you allow me to show this cloth to you, lady?"

Terrible must be the streets of the European small towns where the people whose brain is accustomed to the treasures of the culture are touting the clients into buying cigarettes.

The school year in America was shortened to three months. And 8.5 million American boys and girls simply have no way to receive education.

Great physicist Dittorf has to build the equipment for himself, because his job is not payed for.

The theaters are closing. The painters from Monmartre do not sell their new paintings, they trade them for food.

But the fall of the real science is accompanied by the rise of obscurantism, occultism and spiritism and other pseudoscience. Only in Germany there are 50,000 officially registered wizards, clairvoyants and prophets. "I am bored by all things intellectual. The printed words make me throw up", writes famous Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in the Hitler's government. But he lies! The anti-semitic leaflets make him feel quite well!

It seemed that the damned past of the saint inquisition with its gloomy fires will never return. But Hitler came to power and burned the new fires. "Heil Hitler!", and the degenerate youngsters assaulted the masterpieces of art, culture and science. "Burn them!" – and one of them threw the works of Marx and Lenin to the fire, and the second one burned the books of great Heinrich Mann, Heine, Maxim Gorky.

The "Brown Book", book about the atrocities of the fascists, is bleeding. Hundreds of the most outstanding people in Germany are exiled or sent to concentration camps. The Middle Ages are coming back, but in the even more disgusting form.

But not for long! The crisis of capitalism joins the army of the socialist revolution, which represents the interests of the humanity. And they join even closer, because "near with the capitalist system there is the socialist system, which grows, prospers and withstands the capitalism and demonstrates the putridity of capitalism and shatters its foundation." (J.Stalin).

Now, hundreds of millions of people can see who is killing the life and who is reviving it, making it flourish.

"The man who keeps inventing things all the time" is 89 today

2008-11-10T11:30:00.002Z

Mikhail Kalashnikov celebrates his 89th birthday today.

See his biography on the AK web-site.

7 November. One lesson with Lenin

2008-11-07T10:10:00.002Z

The topic suggests itself. Just for a little diversity i won't stigmatize the bolsheviks. I'll write something about Lenin without exposing his guile and wile.

Many years ago i had a wonderful book, called "Friendly encounters with the English language", written by Maria Kolpakchi. When speaking about English pronouns, she quoted a book "Four lessons with Lenin" by Marietta Shaginyan. What's the link between Lenin and English pronouns?

We know that in 1902-1903 Lenin lived in London under the name of Jacob Richter. Lenin studied the British workers' movement and English language, wrote articles for "Iskra" newspaper, which was published in London those years, and visited the attractions of London, including the Speakers' Corner and the British Library. On 21 April, Lenin sent an application, asking the director of the British Library to allow him studies in the reading room of the Library. The text of the application is:

30. Holford Square. Pentonville W. C.

Sir,

I beg to apply for a ticket of admission to the Reading Room of the British Museum. I came from Russia in order to study the land question, I enclose the reference letter of Mr. Mitchell.

Believe me, Sir, to be Yours faithfully.

Jacob Richter.

April 21. 1902.

To the Director of the British Museum.

A recommendation from I.H.Mitchell, the General Secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions was enclosed in the letter:

April, 20

Dear Sir,

I have pleasure in recommending Mr. Jacob Richter LLD. St. Retersburg for admission to the Reading Room. My friend's purpose in desiring admission is to study the Land Question.

I trust you will be able to comply with this request. Yours truly

I. H. Mitchell

Gen. Secretary General Federation of Trade Unions

168, Temple Chambers

Three days later, when Lenin did not receive a reply from the Library, he sent another recommendation. Written by the same Mitchell, it was typed on an official blank:

General Federation of Trade Unions

Chief Office: 168 - 170,

Temple Chambers Temple Avenue

London, April 23d 1902

Sir,

With reference to my recommendation of Mr. Richter for admission to the Reading Room, the difficulty no doubt arises through the street where I reside (Voltaire Street Clipham) being only recently buitl, and may not yet be in the Directory. I now desire to repeat the recommendation from the above address. Here again however you may not find it correct: in the Directory as prior to December 1901 the address was 40 Bridge House, 181 Queen Victoria Str. E. C.: that address will be found in the Directory.

Trust this may be satisfactory.

Yours truly

I. H. Mitchell

Lenin added his own little letter to this recommendation:

Sir,

In addition to my letter and with reference to Your information N 4332 I enclose the new recommendation of Mr. Mitchell.

Yours faithfully

Jacob Richter

24. April 1902.

On 29 April Lenin for the first time entered the British Library and wrote his pseudonym in the journal. Marietta Shaginyan looked a bit closer to the original letters that i quoted above and noted one little detail of the Lenin's writing. Every time he had to write a capital `I', he pedantically put a dot above the letter. Shaginyan writes:

...The proud single letter `I' is a personal pronoun in English. And this `I' is always written by English speakers as a capital letter, while `you', the second person pronoun, which we usually politely capitalize as `You', Englishmen write in lower-case. The obtrusive pole of `I' is not only capitalized in English, but it cannot be omitted and replaced by a single verb, as in Russian: `ask' instead of `I ask', `speak' instead of `I speak', and so on; and in a story told in first person this `I' always sticks out as a fence. To omit it would be an illiterate English, and Lenin could not decrease the number of `I's in his letters. In the very first letter he had to write it thrice, and not in the middle of the sentences, but right from the start: "I beg", "I came", "I enclose".

And now we come to this little peculiarity of the Lenin's writing style. The capital `I' has no dot above, only lower-case `i' may be dotted. The Englishmen write the `I' in various ways, it may look like a large horn, a whip, a semi-circle, but, from my experience, nobody ever puts a dot above. And Lenin in his applications always puts a tiny neat dot. And I begin to think that the English suddenly grown up `I' made him uneasy, especially when he had to write `you' in lower-case? And by dotting the large `I' Lenin wanted to equal this pronoun to the other words?

If you think it is a total fantasy, then why, why did Lenin, who knew perfectly the rules of the English orthography, in his second application write `Your' with capital Y, in the Russian way?

Frankly speaking, i also felt some uneasyness for a long time before i learned to write huge I's and small you's. So, here's my little tribute to Lenin, the modest tyrant: in this article i capitalized You instead of i. Hope, You liked it, dear readers. And as for You, comrade Lenin, sleep well. Don't wake up, i beg You.

November 6 in Russian history. The "Second Front" in WWII.

2008-11-06T13:17:00.001Z

1942

During the meeting of the Moscow Council of Deputies with communist party organizations Stalin delivered a speech, devoted to the anniversary of the October revolution. Among other things, he said something that later annoyed the Western allies:

How can we explain the fact that the Germans managed to seize the initiative and to have victories on our front? The explanation is that they managed to collect all their reserves, throw them to the Eastern front and to build a numerical advantage on one of the directions. There's no doubt that without these measures they wouldn't reach their goals on our front.

But why did they succeed in building this advantage? Because the absence of the second front in Europe allowed them to to do so avoiding any risk.

...

Suppose, there would be a second front in Europe, as there was one during the First World War, and it would distract about 60 German divisions and about 20 divisions of the German allies. What would the situation look like then? It would become the beginning of the end of the German army, because the Red Army would have been somewhere near Pskov, Minsk, Zhitomir and Odessa instead of where it is now. It means that this summer the German-fascist army would have faced a catastrophe. But it did not happen because there was no second front in Europe.

...

In the First World War, when Germany fought on two fronts, 85 of 220 German divisions fought against Russia. If we add 37 Austrian divisions, 2 Bulgarian and 3 Turkish divisions, there will be 127 divisions. The remaining German forces fought against mostly British and French armies and served in the occupied countries.

Now, in total, 240 divisions are fighting now against us on the Eastern front. The other divisions are located in the occupied countries and some of them are fighting against England in Lybia and Egypt, and only 4 German and 11 Italian divisions are fighting on the Lybian front.

So, we have 240 divisions instead of 127 in the First World War, and instead of 85 German divisions we have 179.

This is the main cause of the tactical successes of the German-fascist army in this summer.

Earlier, in the beginning of 1942, during the public opinion poll in Britain the majority of participants voted for the beginning of the offensive operation on the continent. In April, President Roosevelt wrote to Churchill:

Your people and mine demand the establishment of a front to draw off pressure on the Russians, & these peoples are wise enough to see that the Russians are today killing more Germans & destroying more equipment than you & I put together.

On 22 May 1942, Soviet foreign minister Molotov on a meeting with Churchill, Attlee, Eden and others reported on the upcoming extremely important and large scale battles on the Eastern front. He asked whether the allies will be able to distract at least 40 German divisions to Europe. If they will, said Molotov, Germany may be defeated in this year. Churchill gave no answer.

On 29 May, Roosevelt told Molotov that by the end of the year the USA will have an army of 4 million people and a fleet with 600,000 people and in 1942 they will be ready to open the second front. It was too late, but Roosevelt also promised to discuss with the general staff the possibility of sending 6 to 10 divisions to France in 1942. On the next day, during a meeting with general Marshall, admiral King and Harry Hopkins, Molotov said that postponing the opening of the second front till 1943 will present a risk to the USSR and be dangerous for USA and Britain, too. Molotov asked for the clarification of the allies' position. Roosevelt answered that "We want to open the second front in 1942. This is our hope." On 30 May Molotov reported to Moscow that "Roosevelt and Marshall said that they want to open the second front, but the actions are stalled by the lack of transport ships".

On 28 May Churchill sent a telegram to Roosevelt, explaining the reasons why the opening of the second front doesn't seem possible in 1942. George Marshall was also skeptical on the dates. However, on 1 June Present Roosevelt repeated that he hoped to open the front in 1942. On the same day, the British general staff voted down the operation Sledgehammer.

On 11-12 May a joint Soviet-American communique was published, where both sides said that they agreed on necessity of opening the second front in Europe. The same statement was in the British-Soviet communique. A bit later Roosevelt said to King and Marshall that he just wanted to raise hopes of the Soviet government. Churchill said that the British government does not commit itself to doing so on any certain date.

In July, the governments of USA and Britain decided that instead of landing in France, they will open operations in North Africa. In August 1942, 62% of Americans said in poll that they believed that the second front in Europe will be opened in two or three months.

Well, it went on and on and by November the Soviets were really tired waiting and in on 6 November Stalin continued his speech:

People often ask, whether there will be the second front. Yes, earlier or later, it will be formed. Not only because we need it, but because our allies need it. Our allies understand that after the defeat of France the absence of the second front against Germany might end badly for all freedom-loving countries, including the allies themselves.

The second front was not opened till 6 June 1944, when the Soviets liberated a large part of Russia and Ukraine, including Novgorod, Leningrad, Odessa, Sevastopol and began the offensive that would not stop anymore.

1944

On a similar meeting with the deputies of the Moscow Soviet, Stalin mentioned for the first time "The ten blows of the Soviet army", which were promptly renamed into "Stalin's ten blows":

From Wikipedia:

1. Leningrad-Novgorod Strategic Offensive (14 January - 1 March, 1944). This, the second chronologically of the offensives, fully relieved the siege of Leningrad, which had started on August 30, 1941. Although the Germans resisted fiercely at first, having had years to prepare defensive rings including pillboxes and minefields around Leningrad, once the initial defenses were broken Soviet forces easily reached the border of Estonia. In Stalin's speech he called it the Lifting of the Leningrad Blockade. It was conducted by the Leningrad Front and the Volkhov Front.

2. Dnieper–Carpathian Offensive (24 January 1944 - 17 April 1944). This offensive was launched on Christmas Eve, 1943, the first chronologically of the 1944 offensives. It involved the clearing of Axis forces from Ukraine. It also resulted in the isolation of the German-controlled Crimea. It was called the Liberation of the Right-Bank Ukraine in Stalin's speech, and involved the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Ukrainian Fronts, and the 1st and 2nd Belorussian Fronts.

3. Odessa Offensive (26 March 1944 - 14 April 1944) which begun the third blow, and the Crimean Offensive (8 April - 12 May, 1944) which completed it. The third offensive cleared the Crimea of German and Romanian forces, and recaptured Sevastapol. Adolf Hitler had refused to allow Axis forces to evacuate, believing that retention of the Crimea was vital to maintaining Turkish neutrality. The Red Army attacked over the Perekop Isthmus, and quickly drove the German and Romanian forces back to Sevastopol, which surrendered on 8 May. Although Hitler had finally given permission for evacuation, the majority of soldiers were unable to escape in time and surrendered and went into captivity. Due to heavy casualties suffered by the Romanian forces, this battle was a major factor in their surrender. Stalin called it the Liberation of Odessa and Liberation of the Crimea in his speech. It was conducted by the 4th Ukrainian Front.

4. Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive (9 June - 9 August, 1944). This offensive against Finland recaptured the Karelian Isthmus and Vyborg. After having reached the 1940 border, the Soviet forces stopped voluntarily. It was successful in territorial gains, but due to Finnish fortifications, and German reinforcements was not as great a success as hoped by the Stavka. However, it was an cause of the eventual Finnish surrender on 19 September. Stalin dubbed it the Liberation of Karelia-Finland Soviet Republic. It was carried out by the Leningrad Front and the Karelian Front.

5. Operation Bagration (22 June - 29 August, 1944) Started exactly three years after the invasion of the Soviet Union, and named after Pyotr Bagration, a Russian general during the Napoleonic Wars, this drove the last remaining German forces from Soviet territory, recapturing all of Belarus. It inflicted extremely heave casualties upon the German Army Group Center, to the point of being called "The Destruction of Army Group Center,"and was undoubtedly one of Germany's worst defeats of the war. Soviet forces advanced past the Bobruisk-Mogilev-Vitebsk line, and nearly reached Warsaw before stopping. Almost 30 German divisions were encircled near Minsk, and the prewar border of East Prussia was reached. The Lublin–Brest Offensive is considered part of this operation. Stalin called the operation the Belorussian Operation, and liberation of Lithuania and significant parts of allied Poland, and advance to the borders of Germany." It was conducted by the 1st Baltic Front, and the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Belorussian Fronts.

6. Lvov–Sandomierz Offensive (13 July - 29 August, 1944). This offensive to the south of and concurrent to Operation Bagration advanced through Poland and past the Bug River. Although it made little progress at first, eventually it became successful, capturing Brody, Lvov, and Sandomierz. Called the Liberation of western Ukraine and crossing of the Vistula, it was carried out by the 1st Ukrainian Front. and, in conjunction with Operation Bagration, destroyed the German Army Group Centre

7. Jassy-Kishinev Offensive (19 August - 14 October, 1944). This offensive, beginning with the Jassy-Kishinev Offensive from 20 August to 29 August, and overlapped with the ninth victory by including the abortive East Carpathian Offensive. This offensive and its follow-ups were mainly conducted in the Balkans, and were targeted at German and Romanian formations in Army Group South Ukraine. About 15 or 16 German divisions were encircled with several Romanian divisions during the course of the Soviet advance. These operations, directly caused the capitulation of Romania and Bulgaria. It decimated the formations of Army Group South Ukraine, and Soviet forces advanced deep into Romania. In Stalin's speech, he referred to it as the "Forcing out of the war of Romania and Bulgaria, advancing to the borders of Hungary, and the possibility of offering assistance to allied Yugoslavia." It was carried out by the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts.

8. Baltic Offensive (14 September - 20 November, 1944). Recapturing the Baltic states, including most of Latvia and Estonia, this offensive isolated the Courland Pocket, where 30 divisions of Army Group North were cut off from Army Group Center till the end of the war in Europe. Stalin's speech called the offensive the Liberation of Estonia and Latvia, surrounding of Germans in Courland, and forced exit of Finland from the war. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Baltic Fronts, along with the Leningrad Front carried out this attack.

9. East Carpathian Offensive (8 September 1944 - 28 September 1944), Budapest Offensive (20 October, 1944 - 13 February 1945), and the Belgrade Offensive (14 September 1944 - 24 November 1944). These, the final of the successful 1944 offensives, resulted in the capture of Budapest, on 13 February 1945. Budapest was surrounded by Soviet forces on 26 December, 1944, and, after brutal street fighting, fell. The three offensives were regarded, and planned as a single continuous strategic advance that was also imbued with great political significance due to the participation of the Yugoslav communist forces in its final phase. Stalin called it the crossing of the Carpathian mountains, liberation of Belgrade and offering of direct help to Czechoslovakia, destruction of the Budapest group of Axis forces, and Liberation of Belgrade. It was conducted by the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Ukrainian Fronts.

10. Petsamo–Kirkenes Offensive (7 October - 29 October, 1944). This, the first and only large-scale Arctic military operation started after German forces did not evacuate from Finnish territory by 15 September, as dictated in the terms of the Moscow Armistice. It involved Soviet forces chasing retreating Germans into Norway, and was very successful for the Soviet Union. It led to the occupation of the nickel mines in Pechenga, which had been producing metal vital for the German war effort. Stalin called it the Removal of the threat from German forces to the Soviet northern shipping port of Murmansk and entry into Norway. It was conducted primarily by the Karelian Front, with assistance from Soviet naval forces.

November 5 in Russian history. The Moscow Planetarium.

2008-11-05T09:58:00.002Z

1929

On 5 November 1929 the first planetarium in Russia was opened. The Moscow Planetarium was the 13th planetarium in the world, it was built only 6 years after the "Wonder of Jena" was opened in Munich. The Planetarium was an important ideological object. Its task was to spread the scientific knowledge and to become a centre of the anti-religious propaganda. One of the first lecture held there was titled "Was the world created in six days?". During the WWII, the planetarium was used as a learning center for pilots. Later, in 1960s, cosmonauts also spent a lot of time there, studying astronomy. In 1977, the new planetarium hardware made by Karl Zeiss Jena was installed. It included 119 lamps that produced images of 5400 moving stellar objects.

It was one of the largest planetaria in the world: 27 meters in diameter. In 1929, it took only one year to finish the construction. Now, the reconstruction has already taken more than 13 years and the end is not even near. The events that took place around the Planetarium, deserve to be described by Mikhail Bulgakov, so weird they are.

In the Soviet years, the Planetarium belonged to the All-Union Society "Znanie" (Knowledge). In 1994 a closed corporation "Moscovsky Planetariy" was established. The largest shareholder was a company named Twinz. It belonged to someone Mikitasov, a show-biz producer. It was the first time in post-Soviet Russia when an educational institution was handed over to a private company. In the next two years the building of the planetarium was sometimes used for fashion shows and paintball matches, but the planetarium itself continued its work. The hardware was in good condition, but the building was deteriorating. In 1994 the building was closed for reconstruction. The Moscow government questioned the rights of Twinz, but the court decided that there were no violations of the law and Twinz remained the owner of the building. In 1998, Twinz suddenly agreed to pass 61% of shares to the Moscow government. In 1999 the reconstruction plan was developed, but it was not approved by the Moscow authorities, who were afraid that too many entertainment might hurt the planetarium. It was planned that the reconstruction should be finished in 2006, but in 2006 (or 2007, it was difficult to find out exactly) the Moscow authorities stopped further financing. The work was frozen.

Now, a detective story begins. Of course, during all those years there was no profit from the planetarium. The Moscow government announced that the debt of the corporation "Moskovsky Planetariy" is 1.7 billion rubles (the sum invested by Moscow). On 11 March 2008, on a shareholder meeting, the authorities proposed to dismiss Mikitasov. It's not clear whether the decision was approved, because both sides demonstrate two different versions of the meeting's record. On 25 March the court decided the further examination is necessary and the decision should be postponed till May. On the next day, 26 March, a group of armed people in uniform attacked the planetarium, beat the guards and occupied the building. They confiscated all documents and computers. The web-site of the planetarium was down. Soon, a new director arrived. He promised that the reconstruction would be finished in 2008 and the planetarium will resume its normal activities. In May 2008, the corporation "Moskovsky Planetariy" was officially recognized a bankrupt. They appealed, but in October the court rejected the appeal, ruling that Mikitasov was dismissed in March by the shareholder meeting. The reconstruction is still frozen, the new owners are reviewing the reconstruction plan. Now they promise that the work will be over in September 2009, when the 80th anniversary of the planetarium will be celebrated. It's not yet clear, though, whether they will resume the work or the land lot will be simply sold. The site is located in one of the most commecially valuable districts of Moscow.

A conflict between "the spirit of free entrepreneurship" and the state? Or the war for money between two clans? Either way, this is one of those things why for almost one half of Russians the word "capitalism" is still insulting.

In the meanwhile, Russian ministry of education decided that our schoolchildren do not need astronomy and excluded this subject from the list of obligatory subjects in Russian schools.

Lenin Jugend is 90

2008-10-29T11:24:00.003Z

So, komsomol, aka VLKSM, is 90 years old. This time I will not write about history. I will leave this task to Sean's Russia Blog. Sean will do it better, he's not burdened by recollections. I have never been in komsomol. I can't say it was obligatory in mid-1980s, but not being a komsomol member was uncommon, not to say more. It usually brought an unpleasant surprise and suspicion. Like, if he's not in komsomol, he must have done something very bad. I didn't. On the contrary, I was a "political observer" in school. Worse than that, I was one of the best ones (I think I mentioned it before). To a certain degree, I was a problem for the school's administration. They pressed me to join VLKSM, but I kept kicking over the traces. Once, they lured me to a komsomol meeting. "It's an open meeting, and we've got something we want to discuss", they said. Okay. So, I came there and fifteen minutes I found out with surprise that they are talking about admitting me! Frantically, I tried to think something up to avoid it. And then a lucky star shone on me. A girl decided to ask me: "Tell us, why do you want to join the komsomol?" "Do I?" "Ah, so, he doesn't want to be with us, so let him go!" everybody shouted.

That was the end of my career in komsomol. Sometimes I think that that girl was too smart to make this mistake. I think she knew very well what I thought about komsomol and simply gave me a chance. If so, I thank her.

Some years later, when I graduated from school, I learned that a whole gang of the school's komsomol leaders were detained for robbing freight trains. I have no idea what happened to them, but I thought there was some logic in it.

On the other hand, my beloved wife was also a komsomol leader in her school. And I believe she was a good leader, fair and honest.

In the meanwhile, Lenin Jugend enjoy themselves: Russians remember Soviet youth organization on anniversary. And a blogging lady, one of the higher officials of modern komsomol, wrote about the convention:

On this day, all they gather in one hall: governors and ministers, former governors and former ministers, oligarchs and pensioners, functionaries and managers, bankers and scientists, cosmonauts and engineers, left and right, red, white and blue polka dotted, and all they extol the organization that made them real people.
...
There's something mystical when bankers and oligarchs, highest officials and people of power come to the stage and with fiery eyes, in a voice trembling from tears, talk about the battles for the Soviet power, about feats of labor, about the tents on the construction site of the Bratsk power station... Today all they are the veterans of komsomol.

I assume, some of those gonzels from my school might shed their tears on this feast, too. They would feel at home.

October 29 in Russian history. Nikolay Panin-Kolomenkin.

2008-10-29T09:56:00.006Z

Today, the Olympic Committee of Russia celebrates the 100th anniversary of the first gold Olympic medal for Russia.

1908

Nikolay Aleksandrovich Panin-Kolomenkin won the Olympic gold medal in special figures (figure skating) in London.

Nikolay Kolomenkin was born in a village in Voronezh oblast in 1871. Skating was a common entertainment in Russian villages and Nikolay liked it. In 1882 his parents divorced and his mother took him to St.Petersburg. He graduated from the physical and mathematical faculty of the St.Petersburg University, worked in a state institution, continued skating and was interested in cycling. In 1897 he participated in a skating competition, but was not successful. To prepare for the next competition, he began training. He tied towels around his feet to enhance the balance. In the same year he became the champion of St.Petersburg, but by that time he chose to get a nom de plume (or, rather, nom de patin), Nikolay Panin.

Since 1901, Nikolay participated in championships of Russia and became the champion in 1901, 1902, 1903, 1905 and 1907. In 1903, when St.Petersburg celebrated its 200th anniversary, the International Skating Union decided to hold the world championship in the Russian capital. Panin competed with such famous skaters like the world champion Ulrich Salchow from Sweden, ex-champion Gilbert Fuchs from Germany, champion of Austria Max Bohatsch and champion of Germany Ernst Lassahn. Salchow became the new world champion and Panin won the silver medal.

In February 1908, before the Olympic games, Panin became the winner of the Alexander Panshin Cup in St.Petersburg, besting Salchow for the first time.

The 1908 Summer Olympic games were held in London, from 27 April till 31 October. The Games were longer in those years. The Winter Olympic games did not exist in 1908, but the interest to the figure skating was so high that this sport was included in the program of the Summer games. The figure skating was scheduled on 28-29 October. Besides Salchow and Panin, among the participants there were Heirich Burger, who had won the silver medals of two world championships, Per Thorén, bronze medal winner, Geoffrey Hall-Say and Arthur Cumming, two outstanding British skaters. During the compulsory figures competition on 28 October, Panin performed very well, but the results were disappointing:

Results/Referee	Grenader, Britain	Horle, Sweden	Hügel, Switzerland	Sanders, Russia	Wendt, Germany
Points:	215	232.5	232	235	233
Place:	2	4	4	1	1

Salchow loudly commented every movement of Panin and after a little scandal he was issued an official warning by the referees. Referees from Sweden and Switzerland (Hügel was a good friend of Salchow) gave only the fourth place to Panin, trying to push him further from the first place. Protesting against the bias, Panin refused to participate in the free skate program.

On 29 October, the sportsmen competed in compulsory figures. They presented the drawings of the figures they planned to demonstrate to the referees. The figures presented by Panin were so complicated that the some referees deemed them impossible. Salchow announced he would not take part in this part of the program and Panin became the champion with the best result in the history of compulsory figures: 219 points out of 240 possible.

Ironically, Panin-Kolomenkin never thought that he was a figure skater first of all. His favorite sports was handgun shooting. In eleven years (1907-1917) he was the self-perpetuating champion of Russia in the revolver shooting. And even in 1928, when he was 57 years old, he won the handgun shooting on the Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR (a kind of Olympic-like games, but not restricted to professional sportsmen, which was practiced in the USSR).

In 1915-1917 Panin-Kolomenkin was the head of the National Olympic Committee of Russia. In 1919-1930 he worked in some state financial institutions. Since 1930 he became a trainer in figure skating. During the War he was also a trainer, but not in sports. He taught guerilla war to the Soviet partisans. After the war he returned to the Lesgaft institute of physical culture and sports in Leningrad. Nikolay Panin-Kolomenkin died in 1956.

Update @2008-10-29 14:22:33: A bit too late, I found a longer and a better article about Nikolay Panin: History of figure skating: Nikolay Kolomenkin. This is an excerpt telling the same story:

October 1908, London. Russia is represented by wrestlers A.Petrov, N.Orlov, G.Demin, E.Zamyatin and the only figure skater N.Panin. Among the participants in figure skating were seven time world champion and six time European champion Ulrich Salchow (Sweden), two time silver World medallist, silver and bronze European medallist Henry Burger (Germany), bronze World and European medallist Per Turen (Sweden), Irwin Brown (USA), Nicolai Panin, Arthur Cumming and John Hall-Say (Great Britain). Figure skating competition was included in the Olympic Games program for the first time. "Princess Hall", a covered London skating rink with artificial ice was chosen for its holding. Hardly could the Russian athlete, who recently defeated Salchow, perform the second compulsory figure - "the eight" -as the Swedish athlete shouted: - It's not "the eight"! It's curved! It was a lie. "The eight" was excellent. So, here is the psychological attack, - Panin thought. - Well, Mister Salchow, let's see if I swallow your bait. When Panin was performing his next figure Salchow shouted out: - He is not in a good shape! He can't do anything! And this time the judge still kept silence. Nicolai Panin protested. The Swedish athlete was reproved. One should see what followed then! The Swedish figure skater insulted and threatened Panin in reply. Finally Salchow was put into his proper place. This made him angry and he lost his control. As a result the Swedish athlete was not in his best form when performing some first figures. German judges Veldt and Sanders put Panin on the first place, Swedish judge Grenander put him on the second and Herle and Hugel, a Salchow's close friend, put the Russian athlete on the fourth place. The protest of the Russian team was left without attention. Panin declared then that he was not going to perform his free program: he didn't expect fair marks from Hugel and Herle. Then George Sanders, the Russian judge and a friend of Panin interfered. He managed to persuade Panin that the case with judges wouldn't repeat because Ulrich Salchow and Henri Brokau left the competition, as they understood how worthless it would be to continue. When Nicolai Panin was performing the last and the most difficult figure, "impracticable" according to the newspapers one could hear the stormy applause from the judges' box. His result was the best. Having gained 218 points Panin became the Olympic Games winner champion. That was his first Olympic gold.

The victory at the Olympic Games uncovered Panin's incognito. An unpleasant surprise awaited Panin "the triumph of Russian sport" (as journalists called him) in St. Petersburg. Up to that moment Nicolai Panin was safely protected from undesired talks about his pseudonym at his work place. But the secret was disclosed. The director of the department where Panin worked received a page from a newspaper. There was a big photo of a figure-skater performing some difficult pattern on the ice. The photo was encircled in red. The text below said that it was Nicolai Panin, many-time champion of Russia who had just became the gold medallist at the IV Olympics Games in London. The director was stricken by the resemblance of the champion with Nicolai Kolomenkin - an assistant of tax inspector. - You must stop skating right away, - demanded irritated director from Panin. - It is incredible - a department worker appearing in tights before public!.. - It is useful for health… body development… And of course the honor of the Russian State on international arena. Is it bad? But the director didn't want to hear anything at all. - Either the department or sport.

Burials of Crimean khans found near Bakhchisaray

2008-10-27T12:40:00.000Z

Tatar-Inform news agency reported yesterday that the archaeologists working in Crimean village Salaciq (Salachik), near Bakhchisaray, found eighteen coffins with the remains of first khans of Crimea. The coffins were found in the basement of the mausoleum of khan Haci Giray (Khaji Giray).

This is the first burial of the khans of 15-16 centuries that was found intact, not devastated by the robbers in the last 500 years. It was located near the Zincirli (Zinjirli) Medrese university, founded by khan Mengli Giray in 1502.

The scientists say that among those buried there are Haci Giray, the founder of the Crimean khanate, his son Sahib Giray, who founded the town of Bakhchisaray, his grandson Gazi Giray and others. The tomb was found by serendipity, during the restoration works in the mausoleum. The entry was blocked for the time being and the research will continue later.

Source: В Бахчисарае обнаружены ханские захоронения

Soviet tanks T-34 and BT-7M: Photo albums

2008-10-23T05:39:00.000Z

These two albums include techical data (in Russian), photos from tests, photos of the tanks and their internal construction:

T-34 (19Mb PDF)

BT-7M (22Mb PDF)

October 21 in Russian history. Andrey Tupolev.

2008-10-21T10:28:00.003Z

1923

The first flight of ANT-1, the first airplane designed by Andrey Nikolayevich Tupolev. Tupolev was appointed the head of the aviation department of TsAGI (Central Institute of Aerohydrodynamics) in 1918, when he was 30. In 1922 he formed the Tupolev Construction Bureau and in one year they designed and built the first Soviet whole metal airplane, ANT-1.

Wikipedia dates this event by 20 October, but this date is wrong. It happened on 21 October.

1937

Fourteen years later, another event happens in the life of Andrey Tupolev. Tupolev, who had already been awarded with the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Star and two orders of the Red Banner of Labor, was accused of being an organizer and a leader of the Russian Fascist Party together with another famous airplane designer, Vladimir Petlyakov. Both were arrested.

Under the pressure, Tupolev "confessed" he had been a French spy since 1927. In 1939 he was transferred from a jail into so called "Tupolev's sharashka" (officially called TsKB-29, the Central Construction Bureau 29), where he became the chief designer. The trial took place in May 1940 and he was sentenced to 10 years of prison (which he had to serve in the sharashka, of course) and 5 years of deprivation of civil rights. In July 1940, though, he was released, but continued to work in TsKB-29.

Soviet writer and poet Felix Chuyev, the author of many pro-Stalinist books, once asked Vyacheslav Molotov, the head of the Soviet government in 1937, why Tupolev, Korolyov and many other outstanding engineers were repressed. Molotov replied: "They talked too much. And their circle of friends... They didn't support us. All those tupolevs were a very serious problem for us. For some time they were our opponents, and some time was necessary to bring them closer to the power. We couldn't condone with the chances that they could become especially dangerous. You can't do politics without that. They couldn't build communism. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov used to show his finger at the portraits of Lenin and Stalin and say to his students: `This is who made our life so terrible', and he was the open adversary, who is easy to understad. And Tupolev belongs to the kind of intelligentsia which is indispensable for the Soviet state, but deep inside they opposed us. In their personal life, they carried out the destructive and debasing work. Or, if they didn't, they thought so. And they couldn't live otherwise. "

People say that when the Central Committee of the Communist Party demanded Tupolev finish his work on a new airplane by the time the party congress had to begin, he replied: "Postpone the congress, then." Some days later some party boss called again and ordered that the airplane must be in the air by the day the congress begins and Tupolev agreed, surprising his colleagues. When the congress began, a group of party leaders arrived at the airfield and saw an empty fuselage being carried through the air by two helicopters.

New book based on declassified documents about the beginning of WWII

2008-10-21T08:06:00.002Z

An interesting article appeared in The Sunday Telegraph: Stalin 'planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'.

Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.

Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history, preventing Hitler's pact with Stalin which gave him free rein to go to war with Germany's other neighbours.

The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.

The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin's generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.

But the British and French side - briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals - did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.

...

The Soviet offer - made by war minister Marshall Klementi Voroshilov and Red Army chief of general staff Boris Shaposhnikov - would have put up to 120 infantry divisions (each with some 19,000 troops), 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy artillery pieces, 9,500 tanks and up to 5,500 fighter aircraft and bombers on Germany's borders in the event of war in the west, declassified minutes of the meeting show.

But Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, who lead the British delegation, told his Soviet counterparts that he authorised only to talk, not to make deals.

(Read the full text here)

Lev Sotskov is the author of a number of books on Soviet history, including Operation Tarantella (about Soviet spies in the Cold War Britain) and Unknown Separatism in the Service of SD and Abwehr (on collaboration of separatist movements in Soviet republics with the Nazis). He also participated in the preparation of the collection of documents titled "Baltic Countries and Geopolitics". His books perfectly fit the mainstream of modern Russian interpretation of history: Soviet Union as a victim of the Western politicians who set Hitler at the innocent USSR by selling Czechoslovakia in Munich. In spite of this, the documents used in his books are usually reliable, as far as I know and his new book might be interesting. One just has to be careful with the conclusions.

Victims of Batu Khan found?

2008-10-16T11:28:00.000Z

Archaeologists made a discovery in Vladimir, that ignites imagination. They found five bodies, not properly buried, but lying in a little hole, covered by the a layer of ashes. There were no signs of the violence. Then two more bodies were found. Preliminary analysis says that they belong to women and children and dated by 13th century.

On 7 February 1238, the Mongol army led by Batu Khan captured and sacked Vladimir, a city some 200 kilometres east from Moscow (more about these events in the articles: February 7 in Russian history and Russian history 33: Tatars and Batu Khan).

So, a plausible version of the events that led to the death of these people goes like this. When Batu Khan came to Vladimir, he destroyed the nearby villages. Five women and two children tried to hide in this cavity under the oven. When the fire started, the house fell and entombed them alive. Probably, they suffocated in the smoke. The cause of death and exact dating will be established during the investigation held by the Moscow Institute of Archaeology.

Source (in Russian): Во Владимире нашли захоронение восьмивековой давности.

Some WWII memorabilia

2008-10-16T09:44:00.002Z

Some books printed in the USSR for the Soviet Army:

"В помощь партизану" (Instruction book for partisans) (1942, 140 pages) and "Спутник партизана" (Partisan's Guide) (1942-43, 358 pages) — how to find the enemy, to destroy a warehouse or an airdrome, to explode railways, bridges and locomotives, description of Soviet and German weapons.

Russian-German and Russian-Finnish phrasebooks (both — 1941). "Where are the German troops?" "Which direction?" "You lie!" "Calm down!" "You have nothing to be afraid of!" "The Red Army will come soon!"

All books are scanned in DjVU format and compressed with RAR archiver. You will need a DjVU viewer to open them. You can find one here or here. This program will help you extract files from the archive.

October 14 in Russian history. First scientist on an aerostat. Admiral Ushakov.

2008-10-14T08:43:00.002Z

1765

(3 October Old Style)

Birthday of Yakov Dmitrievich Zakharov, Russian scientist, chemist and pioneer of aeronautics. In 1785 he entered the Göttingen University. Having returned to Russia, he sent his work, titled "Specimen chemicum de differentia et afffinitafe acidi nitrosi cum aliis corporibus", to the Russian Academy of Sciences and in 1790 he became an adjunkt (assistant professor) of the Academy. In 1798 he was promoted to the academician (full member).

He was interested in the recent developments in aeronautics and, especially, in the usage of hydrogen in balloons. On 31 July 1803 (Old Style) he set an experiment in large scale production of hydrogen, which he later described in his paper "On the decompounding of water in a very large vessel by means of overheated iron". He made enough hydrogen to launch a 35 feet balloon.

In 1804 Yakov Zakharov organized and participated in the first flight on scientific purposes in an aerostat ever. The Academy arranged a contract with a Flemish aeronaut E. Robertson and on 30 June Zakharov flew to 2550 meters. The flight took 3 hours and 45 minutes. 100 puds (1600 kg) of iron raspings were used to produce the hydrogen for the balloon. During the flight, Zakharov measured the temperature, pressure and magnetic field and calculated how they decrease with altitude. He also took two birds to observe their flight on high altitude. Using a speaking trumpet, he measured the time for the sound to reflect from the earth and return to the balloon, calculating the height. To a certain degree, it was the first sonar.

1817

(2 October Old Style)

Fyodor Fyodorovich Ushakov, one of the best Russian admirals ever, died in his village Alekseyevka in Mordovia. His most famous victories were in the battle of Fidonisi, the battle of Tendra, the battle of Cape Kaliakra and the liberation of the Ionian islands.

Here's an article about Ushakov, taken from Voice of Russia website:

Fyodor Ushakov, one of the very best naval commanders Russia ever had, just like Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov was widely touted as “invincible”. Attesting to this is the unheard of before fact where Fyodor Ushakov’s fleet, by twice outnumbered by the Turks, lost a hundred times less men. Without losing a single ship, Ushakov routed the Turkish navy sinking more than 50 enemy ships and restoring Russia’s dominion on the Black Sea.

Fyodor Ushakov was born into a family of country gentlemen in central Russia in 1745. After finishing the naval Cadet Corps in 1766, the gifted young warrant officer was given the plum job of commanding the yacht of Empress Catherine II. The appointment promised brilliant career opportunities for Ushakov at the royal court but he still asked to be sent to the Navy. Shortly after Fyodor Ushakov, already a Captain Second Rank, got an appointment to the Black Sea Fleet where he immediately busied himself with building up the navy and training the naval staff. His arrival coinciding with a cholera epidemic, Ushakov promptly ordered his unit into a special encampment with stringent hygienic controls and thus managed to check the spread of the deadly disease. Fyodor Ushakov always cared much for his men’s physical and moral condition.

Back in those days European and other navies, above all the British, consisted of a motley assemblage of sailors forced into slave laboring on the ships and only very rarely allowed to step ashore. There was a small cadre of women allowed on board to entertain the sailors and tend to the wounded during the war. Forced to live in such inhuman conditions, the sailors often went berserk much to the amusement of their commanders who rationalized that the more furious their crews were the better they would fight. Ushakov flatly disagreed. He made sure no woman was allowed on aboard but arranged for special settlements to be built for his sailors ashore so that the people could live a normal family life. Each time the sailors went out to sea their families received all the help they needed. Ushakov also worked hard to keep his men away from the usual debauchery of the port cities. He tempered his kind attitude by no-nonsense exactingness though. He was even more demanding of his officers all this resulting in sailors readily fulfilling orders and the squadron fighting with clockwork precision.

Back in those days Turkey was ruling supreme on the Black Sea. Ushakov and his squadron became the first to dent the Ottoman domination smashing the Turkish fleet off Fidonisy Island. Other grand victories followed and before long the once formidable Turkish navy all but ceased to exist. Several years later a rash of Napoleonic wars that engulfed Europe in the wake of the French Revolution forced Russian Emperor Pavel I to dispatch Field Marshal Alexander Suvorov to Northern Italy and Admiral Ushakov into the Mediterranean to take on the French who had fortified their positions on the Ionian islands. This time round Turkey and Russia were fighting hand in hand and Ushakov led a joint Russian-Turkish flotilla to engage the French troops who had dug themselves in on the Mediterranean islands. Several artful landing operations later the French were forced to vacate the islands and fall back. In that naval campaign Fyodor Ushakov distinguished himself in the assault on the impregnable fortress on Corfu Island and its subsequent capture in 1799. Getting word of that momentous victory Alexander Suvorov, now a Generalissimo, wished he had fought in that battle even as a midshipman. Shortly after capturing the Corfu Island and the Ionian Islands the Russian squadron commended by Admiral Ushakov drove the French out of Rome and Naples. These victories led to the establishment of the so-called Seven-Island Republic – a Greek Orthodox state and a protectorate of the Russian Emperor Pavel I.

Fyodor Ushakov was a very religious man always ready to help those in need. A bachelor and a Spartan in his everyday needs, he never missed a single church service. Playing flute was his only diversion and he was working hard to instill Christian values in the hearts and souls of his men. The Europeans were quick to appreciate the well-mannered and neatly attired Russian sailors. And also their cold-blooded reserve and unbending perseverance.

Upon his retirement in 1807 Fyodor Ushakov settled down near a monastery where his uncle, a monk, was buried, and spent this ebbing years in daily prayers.

In 2000 Admiral Fyodor Uhakov was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in a much deserved acknowledgement of this great warrior and a devout Christian…

wikipedia adds an interesting piece of information:

Distinguishing features of Ushakov's tactics were the using of unified marching and fighting orders, resolute rapprochement with the enemy forcies on a short distance without evolution of a fighting order, a concentration of the basic efforts against flagships of the enemy, reserve allocation («Kaiser-flag squadrons»), a combination of aim artillery fire and maneuver, chasing the enemy up to its full destruction or capture. Giving great value to sea and fire training of staff, Ushakov was the supporter of generalissimo Suvorov's principles of training of sailors and officers. Ushakov's innovations were the one of the first successful development of naval tactics from its "line" to manoeuvring concept.

Manoeuvre used by Ushakov in Battle of Cape Kaliakra (1791) was also successfully used by British vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson in Battle of the Nile (1798) and Battle of Trafalgar (1805.)

Does anyone know if Nelson was really familiar with the tactics of Ushakov?

Computer game Commander Stalin

2008-10-13T11:40:00.003Z

Commander Stalin.

Here's a little bit from the main article:

The game is set in the Soviet Union ruled by Stalin. The player is Stalin. It must organize the state, industrialization and turn it into a major power. This should effectively manage their resources, creating a broad base of social support (workers), launching the existing industry and develop science and technology.

If you advance in the game remain in power as a great leader. But things do not end here. The Soviet Union is now a superpower and the shadow of World War threat to the world. Despite your peaceful intentions, you will be attacked by Nazi Germany. There's nothing you can do about it except defend.

Luck comrade!

I'm not a gamer, but this one might be interesting, just loot at these screenshots :).

Other blogs: A blog on Bulgarian history

2008-10-09T07:04:00.003Z

Vladimir Georgiev recently visited our history forum Sima Qian Studio to announce his blog on Bulgarian history: Bulgarian History. There are only four articles there, but I hope he will make the blog an interesting source of information. The history of Bulgaria has enough events to provide the topics for a blog. Good luck, Vladimir!.

October 7 in Russian history. Eugene Onegin. Komuch in Samara.

2008-10-07T11:09:00.004Z

1830

(25 September Old Style)

(the image on the right is a character from a computer game Eugene Onegin, made in the genre of anime.)

In Boldino, now a village in Nizhny Novgorod oblast, Alexander Pushkin wrote the final lines of Eugene Onegin:

And my companion, so mysterious,
goodbye to you, my true ideal,
my task, so vivid and so serious
and yet so light. All that is real
and enviable for a poet,
in your pursuit I've come to know it:
oblivion of life's stormy ways,
sweet talk with friends. How many days
since, through the mist that dreams arise on,
young Tanya first appeared to me,
Onegin too -- and there to see,
a free romance's far horizon,
still dim, through crystal's magic glass,
before my gaze began to pass.

Of those who heard my opening pages
in friendly gatherings where I read,
as Sadi sang in earlier ages,
``some are far distant, some are dead''.
They've missed Eugene's completed etching.
But she who modelled for the sketching
of Tanya's image... Ah, how great
the toll of those borne off by fate!
Blest he who's left the hurly-burly
of life's repast betimes, nor sought
to drain its beaker down, nor thought
of finishing its book, but early
has wished it an abrupt goodbye --
and, with my Eugene, so have I.

1918

90 years ago, the Red Army occupied Samara, my home town. For some months of 1918 Samara was governed by the members of the Constituent Assembly, the last democratic organ of Russia, dissolved by the bolsheviks in January 1918. The foto on the right was made on that day, after the Red Army entered the city (foto taken from here).

In June 1918, five delegates of the Assembly, members of the socialist-revolutionary party (SRs), came to Samara and organized the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, or Komuch. Their names were Vladimir Volsky, Ivan Brushvit, Prokopy Klimushkin, Boris Fortunatov and Ivan Nesterov. They attempted to restore the democracy and to defend the revolution from the bolshevik coup. Wikipedia writes:

Komuch's executive body was the Council of Department Heads under the lead of Yevgeny Rogovsky. Having seized power with the help of the Czech Legion, Komuch announced "reinstatement" of democratic freedoms: they formally established an 8-hour working day, permitted worker's conferences and congresses of peasants, kept plant and factory committees (fabzavkomy, or fabrichno-zavodskiye komitety) and trade unions. Komuch abrogated the Soviet decrees, returned all the plants, factories and banks to their former owners, declared freedom of private enterprise and reinstated zemstva, city dumas and other establishments. Paying lip service to socialization of land, Komuch, in fact, provided landowners with an opportunity to take away their confiscated lands from the peasants and, also, harvest the winter crops of 1917. Komuch sent punitive expeditions to the rural areas of Russia in order to protect the property of landowners and kulaks, recruit and later mobilize people for the so-called People's Army.

Owing to the military support from interventionists and kulaks and Red Army's weakness, Komuch's power spread into the provinces of Samara, Simbirsk, Kazan, Ufa and Saratov in June-August of 1918.

The Committee attempted to balance between the two strongest powers in Russia: the bolsheviks and the mostly monarchist White Guard. The SR party, which dominated the Constituent Assembly, was the party of peasants, but Komuch failed to convince the peasants in their ability to provide security and prosperity. Bolsheviks had already issued their Decree on Land, abolishing the private property on land and giving the private lands to the peasants. The Decree also said that "the question of compensation shall be examined by the Constituent Assembly", but the Assembly had no chances to discuss this question. So, the peasants had more reasons to trust the bolsheviks than the SRs. Wikipedia concludes:

However, by the early November, the peasants became convinced of Komuch's counterrevolutionary nature and grew wary of it, organizing occasional resistance. In September, Komuch's People's Army sustained a number of defeats from the Red Army and left a major part of Komuch's territories. On September 23, Komuch yielded its power to the Directory of Ufa after a State Conference between the Komuch itself and the Provisional Siberian Government, which would prove to be powerless and short-lived. Both regimes were made to become the new Provisional All-Russian Government (PA-RG).

After Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak's coup, the Directory and other establishments were dissolved by General Vladimir Kappel in November 1918.

Very soon the peasants learned that the real intentions of the bolsheviks had very little to do with their proclamations and decrees. In March 1919 they revolted. Some time ago I wrote:

1919: A peasants revolt, known as the chapan war, begins in the village Novodevichye in the Samara province (chapan is a peasants upper dress). The main reasons were the prodrazvyorstka (the governmental program of food expropriation, when all peasants were obliged to sell what the government considered a surplus to the government for a fixed, very low price), control over the Soviets established by bolsheviks, the red terror and the persecution of religion. In just a few days, the peasants managed to create a new political, social and military structures. A peasants' army was formed, the Soviets were re-elected and a newspaper was organized. The newspaper wrote that the rebellion is not directed against the Soviets, but against "the power of tyrants, murderers and robbers -- communists, anarchists and others, who kill people, take the last grain and kettle, destroy icons", etc. The revolt was led by the Union of Toiling Peasants, a mix of a trade union and a politicized co-operative, created during the revolution of 1905 and not controlled by any political party. There were about 150,000 people participating in the revolt and it was the largest peasants revolt in Russian history. Unfortunately, the rebels had only some hundred rifles and some machine guns. Others were armed with axes and pikes. And yet, they managed to establish control over Stavropol (modern Togliatti, the city where I was born). The province was located on the borderline between the Red and White armies and the rebellion was very dangerous for the bolsheviks. The revolt was suppressed in March 1919 and thousands were killed.