Russian, et al.

I like to collect facts and assessments about languages. So far my favorite, because well observed, I overheard from a young American woman talking to her girlfriends on a bus in Portugal.

Portuguese sounds like a bunch of Russians trying to speak French.

Which is both funny and true.

In fact a Portuguese grad student I met last week in Boston told me that it is a very odd thing but speakers of Slavic languages, especially Russians, are known in Portugal for picking up excellent Portuguese with astonishing speed.

So reading on AOL about learning foreign languages I found this bon mot about Russian that I had never heard before.

Russian: ... As they say, French is the language of love, German is the language of war, and Russian is both. Once you have mastered it, you’ll appreciate its poetic quality.

Which instantly reminded me of the scene in "A Fish Named Wanda" where John Cleese seduces Jamie Lee Curtis by the mere sound of Russian!

Oddly, it never worked for me. Though Carmen's Spanish certainly worked on me.

Old Russia

I found this on You Tube while doing some serious research on Medieval Russia. Fourteenth century in fact. Era of the Golden Horde (long story).

I have no idea what it means but it looks funny as hell. And it's only part one of four.

Does anyone out there have any idea what this is about.

the three pretty ladies form a trio called Via Gra. Really.

The Great Patriotic War in Art

Found a link to a site with artwork from the Soviet Union during World War II (as we call it). You should take a look. Some of it is sappy, some dreadful, all of it hyper-patriotic. But some are arresting.

I like this one, entitled 'Victory Day in Berlin.'

[oops. Forgot the link. Thanks, Jack]

Russian Icon

No, this is not a joke apparently.

"An icon depicting Soviet leader Joseph Stalin has appeared in a church of Leningrad district's city of Strelnya, Novaya Gazeta reported Wednesday."

could lead to a revival of iconoclasm. One can hope.

Drilling: The view from Russia.

That would be the very big country growing powerful enough off of its oil money to tell us convincingly to mind our own business in Georgia. That's it right up there next to Alaska. Here's a little anecdote from Tom Friedman:

Palin’s nomination for vice president and her desire to allow drilling in the Alaskan wilderness “reminded me of a lunch I had three and half years ago with one of the Russian trade attachés,” global trade consultant Edward Goldberg said to me. “After much wine, this gentleman told me that his country was very pleased that the Bush administration wanted to drill in the Alaskan wilderness. In his opinion, the amount of product one could actually derive from there was negligible in terms of needs. However, it signified that the Bush administration was not planning to do anything to create alternative energy, which of course would threaten the economic growth of Russia.”

Of course, Edward Goldberg may have gotten the story wrong, or Tom just made it up. After all, he works for those bozos at the New York Times.

South Ossetia!!

Never heard of it? Shame on you. Actually there are only three people in America who know the full history of the Ossetian people*. I know all three of them personally. One is retired, one is crazy, and I myself have forgotten all the details.

BUT, South Ossetia is the proximate cause of the Russian invasion, no no- incursion... no, visitation into Georgia by the Russian army, no no - para-military forces - uh, no, custom officials, into Georgia that nearly reached the Georgian capital**.

AND as a public service to any of you who have Russian relatives (or Russian colleagues) demanding to know why the Western press won't tell the truth about the Ossetian mess, here is a brief attempt to tell what might be called the truth (for lack of a better term) in something that passes for the Western Press. Actually, it's Wired Magazine.

No, No. No need to thank me.

*They're Iranians.
** It is a scurrilous lie that McCain demanded to know why we let Russians march through Atlanta. It was Sarah Palin.

Obama in Russian

Fun but pointless info:

I was looking through google news and clicked on the page for Russian newspapers, all written in Russian with the Cyrillic alphabet. It was an entire web page crammed with words that I could not make heads or tails of, until I saw this:

Барак Обама

Except for the p=r factor, I could read it in Russian.

Quick - alert the McCain campaign: I see great potential here for an attack ad.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn

He is dead now and will always be one of those odd figures who with nothing much behind him at all may have swayed history. I'll leave that for history to reveal that truth, or not. For now, simply because it is one of my favorite ballads, here is a long, positively epic, song about Solzhenitsyn's experience in World War II. He was certainly no Russian everyman: in fact in some ways this song simply stands for the Russian nation. And I think he would have liked this song too, though for complex reasons of deep seated civilizational love (I don't say nationalism because that is too pale a word for what Solzhenitsyn talked about). In any case, I love both songs, so here they are.

And a little anecdote. I used to work in a history department where Michael J., one of the grads, was a veteran of the gulag just like Solzhenitsyn. Michael spent 15 years there, from age 15 to age 30. He came of age there and told me once that his nation, his homeland, was the gulag. Like Solzhenitsyn he ended up at the Hoover Institute where he worked on his own history of the Soviet gulag.

I asked him once if he didn't think that Solzhenitsyn has already done it, what with his three vol. Gulag Archipelago, each at over 1000 pages.

He thought about it for a few seconds.

"Too superficial."

Leningrad Cowboys addendum

Starting with the movie "The Leningrad Cowboys Go America" that I saw years ago, the special "Leningrad Cowboy" beer can that I gave to Stoly the Mad Cossack, and virtually every you tube clip I've seen of this Finnish group, the Cowboys have been raucous, crazy, and hilarious.

But not in this one.

Babies in Russia - lots of them.

One of our readers, Jack, is in Russia, or Tataristan to be exact (I love all the little Stans ... for years I had a key chain of the Kazakstan national flag which briefly was a Muslim country with more nuclear weapons than you could shake a stick at), and is making some fascinating observations of the scene in old Kazan.

Last 7-7-07 there was a surge, to use a current expression, in marriages here in the USA, as well as in Kazan. So much so that the streets were nearly deserted.

If there are so many marriages, then one would expect that in about nine months there should also be a surge in births (well, it worked that way for my favorite Irish American and my favorite Cuban American couple)**. This is especially significant in Russia where the birth rate has been low and the death rate, mainly due to alcoholism among men, has been high. Jack has some comments on all this here.

I am continually amazed at the quality of observations and writing on some blogs - fewer than I would like but more than I should have expected.

** Maeráed was one result, Joey Sobrino the other. Since Mr Sobrino's dad is 1/4 Irish, is it something about the Emerald Isle?

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The First Cyber War

You may not have noticed but we had a real cyber war not long ago. Estonia is a tiny country, not much known about here in the US of A, that has developed a society and economy highly dependent on the Internet. In fact Estonians do much of their business on the Internet.

A few weeks ago the Russians got very, very, angry at the Estonians. The short and ambiguous history of the resulting "war" can be read in the New York Times.

I knew it would come to this.


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The Decline of the Soviet Empire

I've heard lots of theories of why the Soviet Union fell apart, from Reagan's outspending them into oblivion, to the Pope calling on God to destroy it, to Osama and the other mujihaddin in Afghanistan punching an embarrassing hole in the enterprise. This one is a new one though, and one that is at least plausible. The Saudi's did it when they ramped up petroleum production. The source is interesting too - a former Russian prime minister who would be in a position to know. Here's the core of it:

The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive. The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust.

Very interesting. Their decision was the wrong one, but so were all the other options. Of course, keep the old Russian saying in mind: 'He lied like an eyewitness!'

The Great Patriotic War - Again

Most Americans have absolutely no idea just how vast the war on the Eastern Front was in World War II or that it was the Russians who are most responsible for destroying Hitler and the Third Reich. I've mentioned this once or twice already, but the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine has a review article by Benjamin Schwarz on several new books that reveals just how much new info has come out about the Great Patriotic War and the debt the allies owe to Stalin. In every way imaginable it is a sobering story, especially for those of us who like to find neat little moral lessons attached to our history.

Schwarz slings some impressive numbers around to get our attention: 27 million dead Soviets, 4 million dead Germans, 2 million suspect minorities force marched into the interior, 158,000 Soviets executed for disertion, 926,000 dead Red Army soldiers at the battle of Moscow alone.

He is in agreement with Norman Davies' Europe at War in finding "insufferable" the notion that Britain and America stopped Hitler. For four years 400 Red army and Wehrmacht divisions faced off in a series of vicious and nearly constant battles along a 1,000 mile front. 85% of all German military dead were killed by the Red army. On the Western front, on the other hand, the most intense fighting saw 15 allied divisions facing 15 German divisions.

Now, about those moral lessons. Davies loves Poland and has no liking or sympathy for Stalin, especially after what he did to Poland. Yet his conclusion is clear, as Schwarz puts it: "the most odious criminal regime in Europe's history was defeated by an even more murderous regime, if numbers are the yardstick - which significantly tarnishes any notion of the "Good War."

Geoffrey Robert's is just as provocative in Stalin's Wars, an examination of Stalin's wartime leadership:

To make so many mistakes and to rise from the depths of such defeat to go on to win the greatest military victory in history was a triumph beyond compare... Stalin ... saved the world for democracy.

Lyrics and History

I like songs and poems that put the listener back in a specific spot in history. There are not many out there, at least as far as popular music goes. One of the best was Al Stewart, a British songwriter now living in California. His album "Past, Present, and Future" was a review of the Twentieth Century, including the predictions of Nostradamus. My favorite song on it was "Roads to Moscow" about the German invasion of Russia in World War II. It was a very long song, but I actually used to hear it played on the radio. If you ever have the chance, listen to it. It's just the story of one Russian rifleman, of all the millions, who survived from the first to the last.

ROADS TO MOSCOW

They crossed over the border the hour before dawn
Moving in lines through the day
Most of our planes were destroyed on the ground where they lay
Waiting for orders we held in the wood - word from the front never came
By evening the sound of the gunfire was miles away
Ah, softly we move through the shadows, slip away through the trees
Crossing their lines in the mists in the fields on our hands and our knees

And all that I ever was able to see
The fire in the air glowing red silhouetting the smoke on the breeze
All summer they drove us back through the Ukraine
Smolyensk and Viyasma soon fell
By autumn we stood with our backs to the town of Orel
Closer and closer to Moscow they come - riding the wind like a bell
General Guderian stands at the crest of the hill

Winter brought with her the rains, oceans of mud filled the roads
Gluing the tracks of their tanks to the ground while the sky filled with snow
And all that I ever was able to see
The fire in the air glowing red silhouetting the snow on the breeze
In the footsteps of Napoleon the shadow figures stagger through the winter
Falling back before the gates of Moscow,
Standing in the wings like an avenger

And far away behind their lines the partisans are stirring in the forest
Coming unexpectedly upon their outposts, growing like a promise
You'll never know, you'll never know
Which way to turn, which way to look, you'll never see us
As we're stealing through the blackness of the night
You'll never know, you'll never hear us

And the evening sings in a voice of amber, the dawn is surely coming
The morning road leads to Stalingrad, and the sky is softly humming
Two broken Tigers on fire in the night flicker their souls to the wind
We wait in the lines for the final approach to begin
It's been almost four years that I've carried a gun
At home it'll almost be spring

The flames of the Tigers are lighting the road to Berlin
Ah, quickly we move through the ruins that bow to the ground
The old men and children they send out to face us, they can't slow us down
And all that I ever was able to see
The eyes of the city are opening now it's the end of the dream
I'm coming home, I'm coming home
Now you can taste it in the wind, the war is over

And I listen to the clicking of the train wheels as we roll across the border
And now they ask me of the time
That I was caught behind their lines and taken prisoner
"They only held me for a day, a lucky break", I say;
They turn and listen closer
I'll never know, I'll never know
Why I was taken from the line and all the others
To board a special train and journey deep into the heart of holy Russia

And it's cold and damp in the transit camp, and the air is still and sullen
And the pale sun of October whispers the snow will soon be coming
And I wonder when I'll be home again and the morning answers"Never"
And the evening sighs and the steely Russian skies go on forever