Lvov AKA Lemberg prior to 1918 part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire always had a unique urban more European flavor that other Ukrainian cities. The issue is that Ukraine was always "borderlands" and still is to a large extent. The USA/NATO/EU block vs. the Eastern Russo-Slavic block both claiming Ukraine as their own. The former is collapsing and like all liberal oligarchies is looking for more places to plunder for the 1% while they use their brain fogged propagandized masses as cannon fodder and in their dystopian debt ridden cities think opening scene of the classic "Metropolis" the silent screen gem as the proletariat walking in file brainlessly hopelessly to their "jobs" like cattle to their pens. White the latter though culturally and ethnically in better shape (they have no issue being white, tough, virile and straight) are still struggling with 1917-1991 the gone and unlamented USSR era. I've often reflected that one of post USSR's biggest issue (among others) is that the strong, healthy, white Slav still can't get over that a small group of twisted, perverted, psychopathic, frankly ugly (for the most) "shtetl dreck" and a handful of "ethnic" groups (Poles Georgians Armenians Baltic types) the ultimate "psychotic diversity hire" financed by Wall Street and the City of London could bring down first the autocracy and literally the Russian Empire itself. Then proceed to terrorize, rape, torture and mass murder the Slavs with gay abandon. This dilemma causes older Sovoks to white wash the past and continually chest pound about WWII, while younger ones spurn it for western "liberalism" and all that comes with it such as: debt slavery, diversity hiring at the expense of the majority culture/race, collapsing cities, high crime, multi colored hair, "ink" covered bodies, piercings, buying jeans torn to shreds ( I could never understand that), obesity yeah too many FAT FUCKS walking around and lest we forget the LBGTQ AKA Eye Exam Crowd encouraging kids to destroy their bodies, minds and souls. Icing on the cake an emotionally disturbed "rootless cosmopolitan" (was it's root removed) dressed in the uniform of a female flag officer. Every eastern European country that has embraced "liberalism" except Hungary has become to various degrees a carbon copy of the USA and EU.
All this proves your point Rolo most people are mindless robots. Simply stated, seriously dumb fucks! Not ignorant dumb ignorance can be corrected, dumb and stupid only with great difficulty if at all. Someone once said, "The masses are asses." buy that guy a drink.
If nothing else this shows the bankruptcy of "liberal democratic oligarchy", and why I favor an authoritarian nationalist party or military government even if for a short while to clean up the current mess and it is a serious mess.
Fun report. Galicia was also controlled by the Hapsburgs 1772, so it is no wonder Lvov feels different than the rest of Ukraine. Just another outpost of the global empire.
What I find interesting is how many prominent individuals in the West, many claim to be Russian, Ukrainian, or Polish, are actually from Galicia.
Zbigniew Brezkinski is one of the most prominent. He was born in Warsaw but his family was from Galicia. As the architect of much of our current anti-Russia heritage, his true homeland is important. The current president of Poland also hails from there. The list is actually quite long.
The denial of Nazism by the locals is cute. Ukrainian nationalist are, at their core, Galicians attempting to impose their control over the rest of Ukraine. Bandera is celebrated in Lvov and by Galicians. They might want to claim they are too sophisticated to be Nazis, but I don't know if I can give them a pass.
It sounds like they will do great in Greater Poland once Russia takes the rest of Ukraine.
Agreed. Galicians are the engine of Ukrainian nationalism - without them there would not be that idea and the language is essentially a dialect of Poland that Galician politicians enforced onto the entire country.
This is what makest his war ironic and the fact that Kiev claims its independent from Russia - after all Kiev people are all essentially Russians while the Galicians are Poles. From that perspective the "idenitfication" of "Ukrainians" with Galicians makes no sense. But who cares about sense when narratives reign
«Ukrainian nationalist are, at their core, Galicians attempting to impose their control over the rest of Ukraine. Bandera is celebrated in Lvov and by Galicians. They might want to claim they are too sophisticated to be Nazis»
Indeed the ruthenian xenophobes are not nazis, even if some of them believe themselves to be nazis, they are just standard slavic fascists, like Horthy in Hungary or Pilsudski in Poland or the equivalent romanian, bulgarian, croat, serbian variants.
The see maps where the lithuanian-ruthenian-polish empire stretched from Riga to Nikolaev, to Lvov and want to create Greater Ruthenia, this time where they are on top instead of the poles.
Thanks for this incredibly informative and thought-provoking travelogue. I picked up on 2 points in particular. One was your description of Lviv as a "European" city and your disappointment in its cultural life. Another was "Logic and critical thinking are very rare qualities whereas conformity, submission and stupidity are everywhere apparent."
The problem with urbanites in general is that they regard themselves as sophisitcated, and somehow inoculated against "rural" or even "Sovok" primitivism. (Think Rachel Maddow). They see themselves as "trendy", and are able to shut down their own critical thinking, and engage in "conformity, submission and stupidity" in a state of total, impervious denial. Thus, saying that a BDSM bar might be a really dumb, tasteless and possibly immoral development would be met with personal crticisms of being just too uptight or inhibited, or, at the very minimuum, nerdy.
What makes Trendism so hard to counter is that the Trendy believe that they are especially enlightened, just because their thought processes follow elite recommendations. Thus they can shut off critical thinking because they hold the absurd belief that they know someone who has done the necessary critical thinking for them. (Fauci: to argue against me is to argue against sciece.) The Trendy KNOW, because elite propagandists, who channel public thinking through the most constricted and convoluted intellectual plumbing, told them so.
From my own experience, it's very hard to have a meaningful exchange with such arrogant dumbf**ks, because their social and political positions from the outset prove how right they are. Try just mentioning that you might support some of Donald Trump's policies. Or wthat it might really be impossible for men to get pregant. Or the implications of the fact that tidal gauge records show no deviation in sea level rise over the last century.
To a large extent, believing you're Trendy is to believe your own nonsense, and have unswerving faith in the correctness of your own intellectual position. Having the upper middle classes of society with this psychology poisons public disocurse.
«I met some ardent Galicians who I hung out and we enjoyed the city together. [...] They stressed the importance of them being more European than all the other parts of Ukraine and were quite proud of the fact that many Belarussian Liberals had fled Minsk to hide out in Lvov»
Let's use proper terminology: you met some southern *ruthenians* (northern ruthenians live in west Belarus instead of western Ukraine), probably of the lower "shlyakhta":
In that term "Ruthenia" there is a big deal, because when V. Putin says that "Ukraine" is ethnoculturally "russian" that applies only to what used to be called "Novorossya" plus parts of central Ukraine, but western Ukraine is different:
“I even found my family on the internet! I found my mother's 88 year old sister which meant I could go back to Ukraine as an insider not just a tourist. I really saw both halves of the country that way; westward-looking Kiev which is Catholic and very different from the east, which is a lot closer to the Soviet Union. A lot of people speak Russian in the east so in Ukraine there are two very disparate cultures in one country.”
“The population welcomed us warmly, regardless of how hard it was for them to provide food to soldiers; they always found some nice treats — some villagers boiled chicken, others boiled potatoes and cut lard (soldiers dubbed this kind of catering ‘a grandmother’s ration’). However, such attitudes were common only in the Eastern Ukraine.
As soon as we entered the Western Ukraine, that had passed to the Soviet Union from Poland in 1940, the attitude of the population was quite different — people hid from us in their houses, as they disliked and feared the Muscovites and Kastaps [a disparaging name for Russians in Ukraine – translators comment]. Besides that, those places were Bandera areas, where the nationalistic movement was quite strong.</i>”
There used to be "white", "red", "black" Ruthenia and Muscovy and some people in that region still use those terms, but the Ruthenian kingdom, or the lithuanian-ruthenian-polish empire that succeeded it, is still much remembered in the area.
Part of the tsarist empire or the austrian empire since 1795, so people say in 1918 still had had family memories of that period, and in both 1918 and in 1939 they recreated their independent ruthenian republics (with that name).
«I doubt the average person knows anything about the Ruthenian period nowadays»
Ahhhhh this is one of the most naive statements I have read in a while! Ethnonationalists are not like that, they hang on real hard to past tales of greatness, especially if their ancestors were nobles or gentry. Of course in western Ukraine and western Belarus lots of people are obsessed with the history of Ruthenia and the "intermarium" empire, as as they keep building monuments to Bandera. Just like so many poles are still obsessed with the "intermarium" themselves, or many hungarians about "Greater Hungary" or many serbs about Pristina and Kosovo, or so many turks about the Ottoman Empire, or the bulgarians etc. etc. etc.
The shadows of history are very long; just as details the flag that the belarussian ruthenians used in their nazi-sponsored republic in 1941 and then during the recent "color revolution" attempt is a variant of the lithuanian empire flag, the blue-and-yellow colors in the Ukrainian flag are the heraldic colors of the Kingdom of Ruthenia, and the "trident" was actually the bird of the early middle ages kievan princes.
“In what in 1938 the French and Spanish press identified as "troublemaking" by the National Socialist government of Germany, there were calls in the German press for the independence of a greater Ukraine, which would include Ruthenia, parts of Hungary, the Polish Southeast including Lvov, the Crimea, and Ukraine, including Kyiv and Kharkiv.”
To be fair, in remaking Europe, the Versailles Treaties dredged up a lot of unsettled historical issues that might have lain fallow otherwise. But once brought to peoples' attention, even ancient historical tensions rose to the surface readily enough. Poland even warred with Lithuania in the 1920's over which newly-reconstructed nation should claim Vilnius!
History is also useful to propagandists. Lithuania's relation to Kaliningrad on the Baltic was quite a bit different from Ukraine's relation to Crimean Sevastopol on the Black Sea, yet the Crimean referendum was fanned into Lithuanian hysteria, at a level that to me was only explicable by Ukrainian and Lithuanian commonality in the former Polish-Lithuanian empire.
So while I agree with Rolo that the average person is likely ignorant about Ruthenia, that ignorancee and indifference might be replaced with political derangement whenever some NGO propagandists decide it would serve its purpose.
«the main accusation that is hurled at Russia - that it is Mordor, a dark place full of brute soldiers and alcoholic factory workers who want to enslave the entire world. In other words, the Red period of Russia’s history is still fresh in their minds. [...] the USSR is so hated by many people and by the regions who were conquered by it following the defeat of the Germans in WWII»
This is a considerable rewriting of history: anti-muscovite (rather than anti-russian) sentiment by the ruthenian and polish "shlyakhta"/"schlacta" predates the USSR by more than a century, they hated the tsarist empire as much as the USSR, because the muscovites (Catherine II) conquered the lithuanian-ruthenian-polish empire in which they were the bosses.
«The older generation, even in places like Western Ukraine, is largely pro-Soviet. Why? Well, because they were told to be pro-Soviet by the propagandists of their time. [...] Also, the people in the Soviet Union’s various rust belts are indeed Communists. They are the proletariat of the USSR in whose name the USSR justified its ridiculous political ideology and when the USSR collapsed, these people lost everything. The Donbass is one large rustbelt of obsolete and decaying Soviet industry.»
These two arguments contradict each other: it was not because of learned propaganda that they miss the USSR, but because for many if not most people life in the USSR was overall better than under neoliberalism, also because while the USA corporate extract some income and wealth (but not too much) from its protectorates, the USSR made Russia actually subsidise its protectorates.
The (urban) proletarians under the USSR were paid less but also worked less and had much better job and welfare security. Those who lost out were the upper class (non-existent) and the upper-middle class (better but still modest living standards), and the peasants.
Another huge advantage of the USSR is that the whole COMECON was peaceful and as big free movement area for several decades, the "pax sovietica" worked, and the CSI/CSTO aims to restore that.
For most people of Russia and eastern Europe that was a lot better than the brutal feaudalism-capitalism mixture of the pre-USSR period. Russia and eastern Europe should not be compared to western european countries, but to latin american ones, or Portugal, Spain, Greece, Turkey. Some quotes:
“I fell in with a man in his 60s walking with a single crutch. He was wearing an old telnyashka, the traditional striped undershirt of the Russian military, beneath a great coat. The medals hanging from it clattered. He had been a Soviet paratrooper in Afghanistan, he told me, and was proud of it. But he was also a Ukrainian, from Donetsk, and when the war in Donbas started, he helped organize the volunteers from Pidlypne. [...] Though Ukrainian, he, too, longed for the days of the Soviet Union, he confided. Life was dependable then. The leaders might have been cruel, but they were honest. Now it was a mess. He didn’t know what to expect.”
“"From today's perspective, I believe that we were driven out of paradise when the Wall came down," one person writes, and a 38-year-old man "thanks God" that he was able to experience living in the GDR, noting that it wasn't until after German reunification that he witnessed people who feared for their existence, beggars and homeless people. Today's Germany is described as a "slave state" and a "dictatorship of capital," and some letter writers reject Germany for being, in their opinion, too capitalist or dictatorial, and certainly not democratic.”
Tony Benn, "Diaries", Tuesday 18 April 1967:
“In the evening we went to dinner with Kirillin and his wife and daughter, Ola, at their flat, along with the Ambassador, and Gvishiani, Academician Artsemivitsch and Academician Keldersh. [...] We sat and talked in a tiny little flat where he and his wife and child live. Kirillin is one of the Vice-Premiers of the Soviet Union and an eminent scientist. We sat in his little library while the meal was being laid and we ate together.”
>for many if not most people life in the USSR was overall better than under neoliberalism, also because while the USA corporate extract some income and wealth (but not too much) from its protectorates, the USSR made Russia actually subsidise its protectorates.
Yeah thats true.
>For most people of Russia and eastern Europe that was a lot better than the brutal feaudalism-capitalism mixture of the pre-USSR period.
Don't think so. Some urban proles had it rough, but the peasantry was doing fine.
>Another huge advantage of the USSR is that the whole COMECON was peaceful and as big free movement area for several decades, the "pax sovietica" worked, and the CSI/CSTO aims to restore that.
No, you needed passports and it was difficult to move around.
“the conversation turned to the Wende, the “turning”, as the Germans now call the political and social upheavals of 1989-90 which buried the “workers' and peasants' state of German nationality”, the late unloved German Democratic Republic. "We were all taught in school what would happen if the capitalists took over. They just never believed it. They thought it was all propaganda. The shock was, it was all true, and now they have no one to blame. They can't even claim they were lied to." "They" here are the losers of the Wende, and the speaker is certainly not of their number. A native of Thuringia, trained as a physicist, he found a comfortable management berth after the Wende with a West German pharmaceutical firm, earning fistfuls of hard deutschmarks which buy him the whole panoply of modern consumer goods that he could hardly afford to dream of five years ago. Why then this rude dental inspection of so grand a gift stallion? [...] The first “ingrate” I met was Harry, who drove me from Berlin to the Polish border in the summer of 1992. In his late thirties, with fair hair and soft chin, pudgy and smooth in the way typical of those who sit at a desk for most of the week, or in the driver's seat of his gleaming Mercedes-Benz. Nervous, his hands darting from the wheel as he spoke, blurting out far more than cool reflection would have chosen to reveal to an unknown hitchhiker: for instance, how wealthy he had become in the past two years, selling insurance, and investing in a chain of video-rental shops; and that he was on his way to the bank to deposit a check for over a hundred thousand dollars, which he only prayed would clear; his income, between $6000 and $12000 a month, which he simply stated, rather than flaunting it as a secret and allowing his automobile and shirt label to boast on his behalf, as any Wessi knows is the polite procedure. We made several stops along the way, including one at his home, in a minuscule town near his birthplace barely ten miles from the border city of Frankfurt an der Oder. It was a modern one-family dwelling, trim and bright, more than adequately large for his four-person household, crammed with all the gadgetry and gewgaws that industrial society can offer, and perched upon a serene peninsula that juts out into a picture-postcard lake. Back in the mid-1980's, he told me, the Stasi* had wanted to acquire the whole block of houses, as retreats for favored employees, but one of the owners had refused to sell, scuttling the entire deal. Odd, I had never imagined that refusing the wishes of the Stasi was a live option in the GDR. As a result, Harry was able to purchase this house in 1988, presumably for a small fraction of its current value. Is he satisfied with the Wende? I asked. Rather to my surprise, his reply was a barely qualified negative. He mourned for his uneventful life as an agricultural planner in the Frankfurt district government. He had far less wealth then, he declared, “but you felt better. Now you just have stress.” He found himself forced to work fifteen-hour days to keep pace with the competition, with little opportunity to enjoy what he earned, always afraid that one mistake, one missed deal or undetected fraud could rob him of everything: money, job, home. After an extended stop at the bank brought the cheery news that that check was, in fact, covered, he remarked that he felt constantly threatened, had to maintain perpetual vigilance: “The Wessis are always trying to cheat me.” He railed at the politicians, who are all liars, just like before, and who scheme their own preferment by instigating wars and civil strife. Since the Wende, he complained, social ties and trust have collapsed, neighbors are suspicious, jealous, even violent. Crime has indeed multiplied severalfold in the East, especially auto theft and burglary”
“I saw the end of the Cold War as an ambivalent event: good for many people because it brought them national liberation and the promise of better living standards, but traumatic for others because it brought them the rise of vicious nationalism, wars, unemployment and disastrous declines in income. [...] In a deluge of literature that was written or published after the end of the Cold War, I just could not find almost anything that mirrored my own experiences from the Yugoslavia of the 1960s and 1970s. However hard I tried I just could not see anything in my memories that had to deal with collectivization, killings, political trials, endless bread lines, imprisoned free thinkers and other stories that are currently published in literary magazines. It is even stranger because I was very politically precocious; without exaggeration I think I was more politically-minded than 99% of my peers in the then Yugoslavia.
But my memories of the 1960s and the 1970s are different. I remember long dinners discussing politics, women and nations, long Summer vacations, foreign travel, languid sunsets, whole-night concerts, epic soccer games, girls in mini-skirts, the smell of the new apartment in which my family moved, excitement of new books and of buying my favorite weekly on the evening before the day when it would hit the stands…. I cannot find any of that in Judt, Svetlana Alexeevich or any other writer. I know that some of the memories may be influenced by nostalgia, but as hard as I try I still find them as my dominant memories. I remember many details of each of them to believe that my nostalgia somehow “fabricated” them. I just cannot say they did not happen. [...] Thus I came to realize that all these other memories from Eastern Europe and Communism that pop-up on today’s screens and “populate” the literature, have almost nothing in common with me. And yet I lived under such a regime for thirty years!”
Lvov AKA Lemberg prior to 1918 part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire always had a unique urban more European flavor that other Ukrainian cities. The issue is that Ukraine was always "borderlands" and still is to a large extent. The USA/NATO/EU block vs. the Eastern Russo-Slavic block both claiming Ukraine as their own. The former is collapsing and like all liberal oligarchies is looking for more places to plunder for the 1% while they use their brain fogged propagandized masses as cannon fodder and in their dystopian debt ridden cities think opening scene of the classic "Metropolis" the silent screen gem as the proletariat walking in file brainlessly hopelessly to their "jobs" like cattle to their pens. White the latter though culturally and ethnically in better shape (they have no issue being white, tough, virile and straight) are still struggling with 1917-1991 the gone and unlamented USSR era. I've often reflected that one of post USSR's biggest issue (among others) is that the strong, healthy, white Slav still can't get over that a small group of twisted, perverted, psychopathic, frankly ugly (for the most) "shtetl dreck" and a handful of "ethnic" groups (Poles Georgians Armenians Baltic types) the ultimate "psychotic diversity hire" financed by Wall Street and the City of London could bring down first the autocracy and literally the Russian Empire itself. Then proceed to terrorize, rape, torture and mass murder the Slavs with gay abandon. This dilemma causes older Sovoks to white wash the past and continually chest pound about WWII, while younger ones spurn it for western "liberalism" and all that comes with it such as: debt slavery, diversity hiring at the expense of the majority culture/race, collapsing cities, high crime, multi colored hair, "ink" covered bodies, piercings, buying jeans torn to shreds ( I could never understand that), obesity yeah too many FAT FUCKS walking around and lest we forget the LBGTQ AKA Eye Exam Crowd encouraging kids to destroy their bodies, minds and souls. Icing on the cake an emotionally disturbed "rootless cosmopolitan" (was it's root removed) dressed in the uniform of a female flag officer. Every eastern European country that has embraced "liberalism" except Hungary has become to various degrees a carbon copy of the USA and EU.
All this proves your point Rolo most people are mindless robots. Simply stated, seriously dumb fucks! Not ignorant dumb ignorance can be corrected, dumb and stupid only with great difficulty if at all. Someone once said, "The masses are asses." buy that guy a drink.
If nothing else this shows the bankruptcy of "liberal democratic oligarchy", and why I favor an authoritarian nationalist party or military government even if for a short while to clean up the current mess and it is a serious mess.
You write sentences that are great to read. Thanks for the entertainment and the information.
Fun report. Galicia was also controlled by the Hapsburgs 1772, so it is no wonder Lvov feels different than the rest of Ukraine. Just another outpost of the global empire.
What I find interesting is how many prominent individuals in the West, many claim to be Russian, Ukrainian, or Polish, are actually from Galicia.
Zbigniew Brezkinski is one of the most prominent. He was born in Warsaw but his family was from Galicia. As the architect of much of our current anti-Russia heritage, his true homeland is important. The current president of Poland also hails from there. The list is actually quite long.
The denial of Nazism by the locals is cute. Ukrainian nationalist are, at their core, Galicians attempting to impose their control over the rest of Ukraine. Bandera is celebrated in Lvov and by Galicians. They might want to claim they are too sophisticated to be Nazis, but I don't know if I can give them a pass.
It sounds like they will do great in Greater Poland once Russia takes the rest of Ukraine.
Agreed. Galicians are the engine of Ukrainian nationalism - without them there would not be that idea and the language is essentially a dialect of Poland that Galician politicians enforced onto the entire country.
This is what makest his war ironic and the fact that Kiev claims its independent from Russia - after all Kiev people are all essentially Russians while the Galicians are Poles. From that perspective the "idenitfication" of "Ukrainians" with Galicians makes no sense. But who cares about sense when narratives reign
Exactly. Kiev people have been colonized by Galicians. As Rolo wrote, Galicians don't think Kiev people speak correctly.
Galicia is like Scotland taking over the United Kingdom and claiming to be the real English.
«Ukrainian nationalist are, at their core, Galicians attempting to impose their control over the rest of Ukraine. Bandera is celebrated in Lvov and by Galicians. They might want to claim they are too sophisticated to be Nazis»
Indeed the ruthenian xenophobes are not nazis, even if some of them believe themselves to be nazis, they are just standard slavic fascists, like Horthy in Hungary or Pilsudski in Poland or the equivalent romanian, bulgarian, croat, serbian variants.
The see maps where the lithuanian-ruthenian-polish empire stretched from Riga to Nikolaev, to Lvov and want to create Greater Ruthenia, this time where they are on top instead of the poles.
«see maps where the lithuanian-ruthenian-polish empire»
Kingdom of Ruthenia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Louis%27s_kingdoms_and_his_vassal_territories.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alex_K_Halych-Volhynia_general.png
Lithuanian-ruthenian-polish empire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lithuanian_state_in_13-15th_centuries.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Polska_1386_-_1434.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rzeczpospolita_voivodships.png
Tired: special military operation to de-nazify Ukraine
Wired: special military operation to de-SWPLify Ukraine
Thanks for this incredibly informative and thought-provoking travelogue. I picked up on 2 points in particular. One was your description of Lviv as a "European" city and your disappointment in its cultural life. Another was "Logic and critical thinking are very rare qualities whereas conformity, submission and stupidity are everywhere apparent."
The problem with urbanites in general is that they regard themselves as sophisitcated, and somehow inoculated against "rural" or even "Sovok" primitivism. (Think Rachel Maddow). They see themselves as "trendy", and are able to shut down their own critical thinking, and engage in "conformity, submission and stupidity" in a state of total, impervious denial. Thus, saying that a BDSM bar might be a really dumb, tasteless and possibly immoral development would be met with personal crticisms of being just too uptight or inhibited, or, at the very minimuum, nerdy.
What makes Trendism so hard to counter is that the Trendy believe that they are especially enlightened, just because their thought processes follow elite recommendations. Thus they can shut off critical thinking because they hold the absurd belief that they know someone who has done the necessary critical thinking for them. (Fauci: to argue against me is to argue against sciece.) The Trendy KNOW, because elite propagandists, who channel public thinking through the most constricted and convoluted intellectual plumbing, told them so.
From my own experience, it's very hard to have a meaningful exchange with such arrogant dumbf**ks, because their social and political positions from the outset prove how right they are. Try just mentioning that you might support some of Donald Trump's policies. Or wthat it might really be impossible for men to get pregant. Or the implications of the fact that tidal gauge records show no deviation in sea level rise over the last century.
To a large extent, believing you're Trendy is to believe your own nonsense, and have unswerving faith in the correctness of your own intellectual position. Having the upper middle classes of society with this psychology poisons public disocurse.
«I met some ardent Galicians who I hung out and we enjoyed the city together. [...] They stressed the importance of them being more European than all the other parts of Ukraine and were quite proud of the fact that many Belarussian Liberals had fled Minsk to hide out in Lvov»
Let's use proper terminology: you met some southern *ruthenians* (northern ruthenians live in west Belarus instead of western Ukraine), probably of the lower "shlyakhta":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenian_nobility
In that term "Ruthenia" there is a big deal, because when V. Putin says that "Ukraine" is ethnoculturally "russian" that applies only to what used to be called "Novorossya" plus parts of central Ukraine, but western Ukraine is different:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/southyorkshire/content/articles/2007/04/16/marina_lewycka_rony_robinson_feature.shtml
“I even found my family on the internet! I found my mother's 88 year old sister which meant I could go back to Ukraine as an insider not just a tourist. I really saw both halves of the country that way; westward-looking Kiev which is Catholic and very different from the east, which is a lot closer to the Soviet Union. A lot of people speak Russian in the east so in Ukraine there are two very disparate cultures in one country.”
http://ww2today.com/1-march-1944-the-red-army-marches-across-ukraine
“The population welcomed us warmly, regardless of how hard it was for them to provide food to soldiers; they always found some nice treats — some villagers boiled chicken, others boiled potatoes and cut lard (soldiers dubbed this kind of catering ‘a grandmother’s ration’). However, such attitudes were common only in the Eastern Ukraine.
As soon as we entered the Western Ukraine, that had passed to the Soviet Union from Poland in 1940, the attitude of the population was quite different — people hid from us in their houses, as they disliked and feared the Muscovites and Kastaps [a disparaging name for Russians in Ukraine – translators comment]. Besides that, those places were Bandera areas, where the nationalistic movement was quite strong.</i>”
There used to be "white", "red", "black" Ruthenia and Muscovy and some people in that region still use those terms, but the Ruthenian kingdom, or the lithuanian-ruthenian-polish empire that succeeded it, is still much remembered in the area.
Sure, but they were part of the Russian Empire for centuries and I doubt the average person knows anything about the Ruthenian period nowadays.
«part of the Russian Empire for centuries»
Part of the tsarist empire or the austrian empire since 1795, so people say in 1918 still had had family memories of that period, and in both 1918 and in 1939 they recreated their independent ruthenian republics (with that name).
«I doubt the average person knows anything about the Ruthenian period nowadays»
Ahhhhh this is one of the most naive statements I have read in a while! Ethnonationalists are not like that, they hang on real hard to past tales of greatness, especially if their ancestors were nobles or gentry. Of course in western Ukraine and western Belarus lots of people are obsessed with the history of Ruthenia and the "intermarium" empire, as as they keep building monuments to Bandera. Just like so many poles are still obsessed with the "intermarium" themselves, or many hungarians about "Greater Hungary" or many serbs about Pristina and Kosovo, or so many turks about the Ottoman Empire, or the bulgarians etc. etc. etc.
The shadows of history are very long; just as details the flag that the belarussian ruthenians used in their nazi-sponsored republic in 1941 and then during the recent "color revolution" attempt is a variant of the lithuanian empire flag, the blue-and-yellow colors in the Ukrainian flag are the heraldic colors of the Kingdom of Ruthenia, and the "trident" was actually the bird of the early middle ages kievan princes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Galicia%E2%80%93Volhynia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Ukraine#Kingdom_of_Ruthenia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dyvizia_Galychyna-rukav.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Project_of_the_Large_coat_of_arms_of_Ukraine_(color).png
Another funny quote on the "prometheism" topic, showing that the shadows of history last a long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenia
“In what in 1938 the French and Spanish press identified as "troublemaking" by the National Socialist government of Germany, there were calls in the German press for the independence of a greater Ukraine, which would include Ruthenia, parts of Hungary, the Polish Southeast including Lvov, the Crimea, and Ukraine, including Kyiv and Kharkiv.”
Fair enough.
To be fair, in remaking Europe, the Versailles Treaties dredged up a lot of unsettled historical issues that might have lain fallow otherwise. But once brought to peoples' attention, even ancient historical tensions rose to the surface readily enough. Poland even warred with Lithuania in the 1920's over which newly-reconstructed nation should claim Vilnius!
History is also useful to propagandists. Lithuania's relation to Kaliningrad on the Baltic was quite a bit different from Ukraine's relation to Crimean Sevastopol on the Black Sea, yet the Crimean referendum was fanned into Lithuanian hysteria, at a level that to me was only explicable by Ukrainian and Lithuanian commonality in the former Polish-Lithuanian empire.
So while I agree with Rolo that the average person is likely ignorant about Ruthenia, that ignorancee and indifference might be replaced with political derangement whenever some NGO propagandists decide it would serve its purpose.
«the main accusation that is hurled at Russia - that it is Mordor, a dark place full of brute soldiers and alcoholic factory workers who want to enslave the entire world. In other words, the Red period of Russia’s history is still fresh in their minds. [...] the USSR is so hated by many people and by the regions who were conquered by it following the defeat of the Germans in WWII»
This is a considerable rewriting of history: anti-muscovite (rather than anti-russian) sentiment by the ruthenian and polish "shlyakhta"/"schlacta" predates the USSR by more than a century, they hated the tsarist empire as much as the USSR, because the muscovites (Catherine II) conquered the lithuanian-ruthenian-polish empire in which they were the bosses.
«The older generation, even in places like Western Ukraine, is largely pro-Soviet. Why? Well, because they were told to be pro-Soviet by the propagandists of their time. [...] Also, the people in the Soviet Union’s various rust belts are indeed Communists. They are the proletariat of the USSR in whose name the USSR justified its ridiculous political ideology and when the USSR collapsed, these people lost everything. The Donbass is one large rustbelt of obsolete and decaying Soviet industry.»
These two arguments contradict each other: it was not because of learned propaganda that they miss the USSR, but because for many if not most people life in the USSR was overall better than under neoliberalism, also because while the USA corporate extract some income and wealth (but not too much) from its protectorates, the USSR made Russia actually subsidise its protectorates.
The (urban) proletarians under the USSR were paid less but also worked less and had much better job and welfare security. Those who lost out were the upper class (non-existent) and the upper-middle class (better but still modest living standards), and the peasants.
Another huge advantage of the USSR is that the whole COMECON was peaceful and as big free movement area for several decades, the "pax sovietica" worked, and the CSI/CSTO aims to restore that.
For most people of Russia and eastern Europe that was a lot better than the brutal feaudalism-capitalism mixture of the pre-USSR period. Russia and eastern Europe should not be compared to western european countries, but to latin american ones, or Portugal, Spain, Greece, Turkey. Some quotes:
https://vk.com/@new_forwardls_ru-in-the-trenches-of-ukraines-forever-war
“I fell in with a man in his 60s walking with a single crutch. He was wearing an old telnyashka, the traditional striped undershirt of the Russian military, beneath a great coat. The medals hanging from it clattered. He had been a Soviet paratrooper in Afghanistan, he told me, and was proud of it. But he was also a Ukrainian, from Donetsk, and when the war in Donbas started, he helped organize the volunteers from Pidlypne. [...] Though Ukrainian, he, too, longed for the days of the Soviet Union, he confided. Life was dependable then. The leaders might have been cruel, but they were honest. Now it was a mess. He didn’t know what to expect.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-dictatorship-majority-of-eastern-germans-feel-life-better-under-communism-a-634122.html
“"From today's perspective, I believe that we were driven out of paradise when the Wall came down," one person writes, and a 38-year-old man "thanks God" that he was able to experience living in the GDR, noting that it wasn't until after German reunification that he witnessed people who feared for their existence, beggars and homeless people. Today's Germany is described as a "slave state" and a "dictatorship of capital," and some letter writers reject Germany for being, in their opinion, too capitalist or dictatorial, and certainly not democratic.”
Tony Benn, "Diaries", Tuesday 18 April 1967:
“In the evening we went to dinner with Kirillin and his wife and daughter, Ola, at their flat, along with the Ambassador, and Gvishiani, Academician Artsemivitsch and Academician Keldersh. [...] We sat and talked in a tiny little flat where he and his wife and child live. Kirillin is one of the Vice-Premiers of the Soviet Union and an eminent scientist. We sat in his little library while the meal was being laid and we ate together.”
>for many if not most people life in the USSR was overall better than under neoliberalism, also because while the USA corporate extract some income and wealth (but not too much) from its protectorates, the USSR made Russia actually subsidise its protectorates.
Yeah thats true.
>For most people of Russia and eastern Europe that was a lot better than the brutal feaudalism-capitalism mixture of the pre-USSR period.
Don't think so. Some urban proles had it rough, but the peasantry was doing fine.
>Another huge advantage of the USSR is that the whole COMECON was peaceful and as big free movement area for several decades, the "pax sovietica" worked, and the CSI/CSTO aims to restore that.
No, you needed passports and it was difficult to move around.
Also:
https://www.steinsaltz.me.uk/aufschwung-ost
“the conversation turned to the Wende, the “turning”, as the Germans now call the political and social upheavals of 1989-90 which buried the “workers' and peasants' state of German nationality”, the late unloved German Democratic Republic. "We were all taught in school what would happen if the capitalists took over. They just never believed it. They thought it was all propaganda. The shock was, it was all true, and now they have no one to blame. They can't even claim they were lied to." "They" here are the losers of the Wende, and the speaker is certainly not of their number. A native of Thuringia, trained as a physicist, he found a comfortable management berth after the Wende with a West German pharmaceutical firm, earning fistfuls of hard deutschmarks which buy him the whole panoply of modern consumer goods that he could hardly afford to dream of five years ago. Why then this rude dental inspection of so grand a gift stallion? [...] The first “ingrate” I met was Harry, who drove me from Berlin to the Polish border in the summer of 1992. In his late thirties, with fair hair and soft chin, pudgy and smooth in the way typical of those who sit at a desk for most of the week, or in the driver's seat of his gleaming Mercedes-Benz. Nervous, his hands darting from the wheel as he spoke, blurting out far more than cool reflection would have chosen to reveal to an unknown hitchhiker: for instance, how wealthy he had become in the past two years, selling insurance, and investing in a chain of video-rental shops; and that he was on his way to the bank to deposit a check for over a hundred thousand dollars, which he only prayed would clear; his income, between $6000 and $12000 a month, which he simply stated, rather than flaunting it as a secret and allowing his automobile and shirt label to boast on his behalf, as any Wessi knows is the polite procedure. We made several stops along the way, including one at his home, in a minuscule town near his birthplace barely ten miles from the border city of Frankfurt an der Oder. It was a modern one-family dwelling, trim and bright, more than adequately large for his four-person household, crammed with all the gadgetry and gewgaws that industrial society can offer, and perched upon a serene peninsula that juts out into a picture-postcard lake. Back in the mid-1980's, he told me, the Stasi* had wanted to acquire the whole block of houses, as retreats for favored employees, but one of the owners had refused to sell, scuttling the entire deal. Odd, I had never imagined that refusing the wishes of the Stasi was a live option in the GDR. As a result, Harry was able to purchase this house in 1988, presumably for a small fraction of its current value. Is he satisfied with the Wende? I asked. Rather to my surprise, his reply was a barely qualified negative. He mourned for his uneventful life as an agricultural planner in the Frankfurt district government. He had far less wealth then, he declared, “but you felt better. Now you just have stress.” He found himself forced to work fifteen-hour days to keep pace with the competition, with little opportunity to enjoy what he earned, always afraid that one mistake, one missed deal or undetected fraud could rob him of everything: money, job, home. After an extended stop at the bank brought the cheery news that that check was, in fact, covered, he remarked that he felt constantly threatened, had to maintain perpetual vigilance: “The Wessis are always trying to cheat me.” He railed at the politicians, who are all liars, just like before, and who scheme their own preferment by instigating wars and civil strife. Since the Wende, he complained, social ties and trust have collapsed, neighbors are suspicious, jealous, even violent. Crime has indeed multiplied severalfold in the East, especially auto theft and burglary”
http://glineq.blogspot.com/2017/09/how-i-lost-my-past.html
“I saw the end of the Cold War as an ambivalent event: good for many people because it brought them national liberation and the promise of better living standards, but traumatic for others because it brought them the rise of vicious nationalism, wars, unemployment and disastrous declines in income. [...] In a deluge of literature that was written or published after the end of the Cold War, I just could not find almost anything that mirrored my own experiences from the Yugoslavia of the 1960s and 1970s. However hard I tried I just could not see anything in my memories that had to deal with collectivization, killings, political trials, endless bread lines, imprisoned free thinkers and other stories that are currently published in literary magazines. It is even stranger because I was very politically precocious; without exaggeration I think I was more politically-minded than 99% of my peers in the then Yugoslavia.
But my memories of the 1960s and the 1970s are different. I remember long dinners discussing politics, women and nations, long Summer vacations, foreign travel, languid sunsets, whole-night concerts, epic soccer games, girls in mini-skirts, the smell of the new apartment in which my family moved, excitement of new books and of buying my favorite weekly on the evening before the day when it would hit the stands…. I cannot find any of that in Judt, Svetlana Alexeevich or any other writer. I know that some of the memories may be influenced by nostalgia, but as hard as I try I still find them as my dominant memories. I remember many details of each of them to believe that my nostalgia somehow “fabricated” them. I just cannot say they did not happen. [...] Thus I came to realize that all these other memories from Eastern Europe and Communism that pop-up on today’s screens and “populate” the literature, have almost nothing in common with me. And yet I lived under such a regime for thirty years!”