Ten Things You Didn't Know About Russia Part 2

[Andrew Jameson]

TEN THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT RUSSIA PART 2 

 

I find this conversation very very interesting I don't know if people
consider it odd, but places mentioned in Crime and Punishment are still very
much there in St. Petersburg.  Sohail Abdullah 

 

“The largest fresh water lake on the planet, with its own unique species of
flora and fauna John Langran”  furthermore, it throws accepted ideas of
"biodiversity ' for a loop, in that it is located far from the tropics and
is therefore important as an item of general knowledge  colkitto

 

... and if you believe the court gossip, and some historians, her husband
wasn't the father of Paul -- a courtier by the name of Sergei Saltykov seems
to be the likely candidate --, which would mean that the Romanov bloodline
ended long before the dynasty did.  Valentino, Russell

 

There is also a well-researched list, with far more than the variety of
trivia (interesting trivia, of course) collected here: Steven Marks, How
Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Antisemitism, Ballet to
Bolshevism (and those are only the As and Bs). 

A couple of examples of particular interest from that source: Kropotkin's
influence on the city green movement (through a variety of intermediaries);
Tolstoy's influence on the U.S. civil rights movement (again through middle
terms, like Ghandi); the particularly virulent form of antisemitism that
came out of Russia at the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th cc. that
produced the Black Hundreds and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, still
easy to find in popular sources; the Tolstoy-Stanislavsky influence on the
method acting of Brando, DeNiro, et al.

The book's weak point is its short synopses of the works of various
thinkers, which can sometimes be reductive, but it is especially good at
tracing influences around the world, e.g., Bakunin in Japan, Dostoevsky in
Egypt, Latin America, and so on.

Kropotkin's doctrine of cooperationism, rather than competition, as the
guiding principle of evolution (which Marks explores) ties in with another,
oft-neglected but excellent study: Daniel P. Todes, Darwin Without Malthus:
the Struggle for Existence in Evolutionary Thought, which advances the
thesis that Russian biologists, observing the ecosystems of the steppe,
created the discipline of ecology at the end of the 19th century.
Valentino, Russell [russell-valentino at UIOWA.EDU]

 

> Ekaterina  II  wasn't Russian...> 

Well NO ONE at the head of any European monarchy was purely anything, since
rather than marry minor local nobility or (pass the smelling salts!!)
commoners, one often married foreign royalty.

Apparently Victoria was particularly successful at placing her descendants.
In 1914, those crowned heads and their little war were all related. I
believe Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II were "Cousin Nicky" and "Cousin
Willy" to the King of England. Even the current consort, Philip of
Edinburgh, originally from Greece, is a great-great-grandson of Victoria ...

But I guess Ekaterina/Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst was probably mostly "German"
when she married, and not one bit Russian, so Katarina is right too. And it
makes for a good one-liner. 

Francoise Rosset, Associate Professor

 

Along this line, Stanislavsky's "method acting" technique influenced Marlon
Brando and a host of other actors and actresses of that and later
generations.  -John Pendergast

 

>The Russian Empire (just like today's Russian Federation) was a
>multi-ethnic and multi-religious country. A synagogue, Protestant and
>Catholic churches did not make Tsarskoe Selo "international" - native
>subjects of the Empire were probably the people who mainly attended them.
>Felix Corley

No doubt...

Maybe I should have said "multi-national".  But wasn't 19th Cent. Russia
called in the west the "prisonhouse of nations"?  Jules Levin

 

Borsht is actually not a Russian dish but a Ukrainian one.  

The name Great Russia comes from the Byzantines who called the northern and
southern part of the lands of Rus’ as: њ±єБ¬ ЎЙГЇ± (Makra Rosia - Great
Rus’) and њ№єБ¬ ЎЙГЇ± (Mikra Rosia - Minor Rus’ or Little Rus’),
respectively, following the pattern used for Greece -- where Little Greece
was the centre and Great Greece were its colonies.    

The very name Russia applied to Moscow Princedom was first introduced by
Peter the Great (Butcher) who sent money to foreign ambassadors so that they
called this country in their official papers Russia, not in any other way.
With best regards,    Maria Dmytrieva [xmas at UKR.NET]

 

Could we still return to Russia's priority on multi-engine planes? Is there
a source? (And apologies if it was meant as a joke--I read it very quickly.)
Thanks, Jindrich Toman

 

Was it referring to Igor Sikorskii's plane "The Grand"?   Charlotte Douglas

 

See the Wikipedia article for "Igor Sikorsky".  Alternatively, I discuss the
plane (known alternatively as "The Big Baltic" or "Le Grande" before it was
finally re-named the "Russian Warrior") on pp. 56-58 of my book
_Dictatorship of the Air_   Scott W Palmer

 

Francoise Rosset wrote: “Apparently Victoria was particularly successful at
placing her descendants”.

And then there was the practice of the Habsburgs, which led to the poetic
aphorism (attributed variously to Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, and
to Mathias Corvinus, King of Hungary) "Bella gerant alii, tu, felix Austria,
nube/ Nam quae Mars aliis, dat tibi regna Venus" (Let others wage war; you,
O happy Austria, marry; for those kingdoms that Mars gives to others, Venus
gives to thee). The first line is more often quoted than the whole
distich.//  Bob Rothstein

 

Yes, it's 1915--great, thanks. JT

 

The plane debuted (and was destroyed) in 1913.  Scott W Palmer.

 

For the general public: 

Russia is not the same thing as the former Soviet Union; it was only part of
the FSU.

Until the 20th century, the bulk of Russia's land area was inhabited by
people who couldn't speak Russian (though of course Russians were far more
numerous because the vast outlying areas were sparsely populated).  Paul B.
Gallagher

 

Yes, back to earth, and why not add a statistic about Soviet losses in ww2.
John Langran

 

Borscht was originally made not with beets, but with a root similar to
carrots or parsnips, called "borscht." Only later, during the 16C, "borscht"
root was replaced by beets in the soup. (from Olive Trees and Honey by Gil
Marks)  Laura Kline

 

On the subject of "multicultural Russia," one might mention the fact that
Christianity was not the first major world religion to attain official
status within the territory of what is today the Russian Federation. It was
preceded by Judaism (adopted by the Turkic-speaking Khazars in the late
8th-early 9th century), and by Islam, which became the dominant religion of
the Volga Bulgars -- who are believed to have played an important role in
the ethnogenesis of the Kazan Tatars -- in the early 10th century.

      Russia today has the largest number of Muslims of any "European"
country (estimates range from between 14 to 22 million), and this segment of
the population is growing rapidly, due both to high birthrates among groups
originating in the North Caucasus and immigration of Muslim ethnic groups
from the "Near Abroad." This is, by the way, the reason that Russia, along
with Bosnia-Hercegovina, was recently granted observer status in the
Organisation of the Islamic Conference, an organization of states with
Muslim majorities (http://www.oic-oci.org/oicnew/page_detail.asp?p_id=52).
Some analysts  even go so far as to argue that if current demographic trends
continue, barring significant religious/cultural identity shifts among
traditionally Muslim ethnic groups, the Russian Federation could become a
Muslim majority country by the latter part of the 21st century!

     And here's another interesting fact about Russia's ethnically
non-Russian regions: the title of the oldest city in the Russian Federation
is held by Derbent, Dagestan, which supposedly dates back some 5,000 years
as an urban center.  Curt Woolhiser

 

And if you are interested in religion and stats -

Today's Russia's religious minorities include: 9-28 million Muslims; as many
as 2.5 million Old Believers; 1.5-2 million Buddhists; .5-1.5 million
Catholics; as many as 2 million Protestants; .25-2 million Jews; and many
pagan faiths including a large Shaman population, many of whom are based
around Lake Baikal and hold regular festivals there. The Orthodox number
between 45 and 80 percent of the population. 

And, of course, perhaps most interesting is the massive difference between
the stats reported by various agencies (religious, governmental, etc. - a
difference of 300% is pretty hard to explain by margin of error) More info
on this: http://www.sras.org/library_religion_russia 

(P.S. our site is loaded with cool stuff like this)   Josh Wilson SRAS

 

Vasmer, s.v. borshch, says the earlier plant used was borshchevnik
(Heracleum spondylium), which in English is hogweed or cow parsnip.  One can
see why they changed to beet. Whether the soup is Russian, Belarusian,
Ukrainian or Polish in origin is probably a matter of which football team
you support.  Will Ryan

 

The writer of Domostroj enjoins his readers to plant borshch all round the
edge of the garden with a view to boiling it up, presumably to make soup:

а возле тына около всего огорода борщу сеет где кропива ростет и с весны его
варит про себя много [a vozle tyna okolo vsego ogoroda borshchu seet gde
kropiva rostet i s vesny ego varit pro sebja mnogo] (apologies for the
modernised spelling).

Borshch, as a plant, is apparently 'cow parsnip' in English, and I assume
that it was the tops, not the roots, that were boiled up.  Incidentally, I
recall in the days of my youth drinking something called 'nettle beer'; it
wouid seem therefore that the writer of Domostroj, not normally a person to
let slip an opportunity for thrift, has on this occasion missed a trick.

And (чтобы два раза не кликать) George V and Nicholas II were indeed
cousins, but this was because their mothers, Queen Alexandra and
Dagmar/Marija Fedorovna respectively, were sisters.  In this instance the
credit for astute matrimonial placement (not that it did the Tsar much good
in the end) goes to Christian IX of Denmark.  John Dunn.

 

How about--Vladivostok is roughly half-way between Moscow and New York (The
hard way)?

George Kalbouss

 

Replying to Maria Dmytrieva <xmas at UKR.NET> :

Not exactly. "Megale Rhosia" rather than "Makra Rhosia" for the "Great"
version.. More importantly, "Mikra Rhosia" was not the "centre" as opposed
to "colonies" (and certainly not by any analogy with Greece) but was used
mainly in Byzantine administrative documents relating to Rus bishoprics
under Lithuanian rule. For full citations from all the Greek sources on both
forms see Mikhail Biblkov'a book "Byzantinorossica: svod vizantiiskikh
svidetel'stv o Rusi" (2004), pp. 172-4, 403-5, 597, 600-601.  Simon Franklin

 

 


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