Tag Archives: history

Prague’s Shame – Petty-minded Prague-6 mayor Ondřej Kolář erases the memory of Prague’s saviour, Marshal Ivan Konev

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This year marks the 75th Anniversary of the Victory over the German Fascists, where Soviet Union played the decisive and definitive role in sealing that Victory. This role of USSR is like a thorn in the eye of the modern day revisionists and neo-Fascists, who over the past decades have been ferociously rewriting history and smearing Russia as the heir to the USSR. The history is remembered as long as there are physical manifestations of said history left in the world.

As such, the especially vicious battle has been wielded against the monuments commemorating the Soviet (and by that meaning all nationalities, not just Russian) soldiers and commanders on the post-Soviet space. Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and others started the trend as soon as the CIA assets took power in those countries. After 2014, once the neo-Fascits took hold of power in Ukraine with the help of the USA and EU, the demolition of the WWII memorials was put on the assembly line rate level, at the same tempo as the destruction of the Ukrainian economy that it inherited after the USSR.

Now, that the date of the 75th Anniversary is drawing ever nearer, the newest salvo in the war on the historical monuments was heard from Prague, Czech Republic, where the memorial to Marshal Ivan Konev – the saviour of Prague – was torn down. If not for Konev’s army and his decisive, yet careful actions, Prague would be looking like Dresden now. Albeit, not because of the American firebombing, but because of the demolition charges that the retreating German forces put all around the city. It is the remembrance of the salvation of such cities as Prague and Krakow – at great self-sacrificial cost on the part of the Soviet troops – that the CIA assets are eager to destroy.

Addendum Lada Ray published a very forceful article about the desecration of the memorial to Prague’s saviour on Patreon: 75 Years Later, Nazism Won in Europe? Czechia Demolishes Monument to Russian Marshal Konev, Liberator of Auschwitz & Prague! (LADA RAY REPORT)
Please read it, as it contains a much deeper historical perspective around the liberation of Prague, as wellanalysis of the situation with the war on monuments in particular and the state of the Western world in general.

Related article translation that I published 5 years ago, the the 70th Anniversary: Prague Winter. What is the Czechs’ attitude towards the coming 70th anniversary of the Victory?

Below is my speed-translation of an article from “Argumenty i Facty” from 09.04.2020, showing the shame of Prague district 6 in all its ignominious glory.

“Let’s return Marshal home!” Will the memorial to Ivan Konev come to Moscow from Prague?

Descendants of the Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev began collecting signatures for the transfer to Russia of the monument to the commander that was dismantled in Prague. The daughter of the Marshal, Natalia Koneva, hopes that the monument will be installed in Moscow.

“We have Marshal Konev street. And it will be natural if the monument would stand on it.”

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Russian Help to Italy – The Selfless Deed Now, Just As 111 Years Ago

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I was initially not going to write about the current COVID-19 outbreak, but after the recent massive Russian help to Italy, and seeing how it was maligned by the NATO-associated propaganda centres, I felt compelled to turn to history once again, and show that this is not the first time Russia reaches out a helping hand to Italy.

Those interested to see how the NATO think-tanks work, there is an excellent analytical article by Bryan MacDonald on RT: How disinformation really works: Activists linked to pro-NATO think tank smear Russian Covid-19 aid to Italy.

But we shall look back in time, into the not-so-distant past of year 1908…

Below are translations of two articles detailing those events.

Memorial to Russian Sailors at Messina

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History being rewritten in front of our eyes…

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When I published the translation of a 6-year-old article “So many? Really?” Germans do not know how many Russians were killed by their ancestors, I got some vehement response, and even more vehement responses came to Lada’s repost of my translation at FuturistTrendcast.

What scares me is how the history is being rewritten right in front of our very eyes, while a few of the contemporaries of WWII are still alive, and while their ancestors still remember their stories, like I remember the story of my grand-uncle. The most scary part is the passive acceptance of the twisted half-truths and lies, peddled by the media, by the general populace. What can we say about the events of 1812 and before (like when the Dutch have forgotten the Russian help in restoration of their state), what can we say about the changes done to our history, when the history is being so thoroughly rewritten right now?!

Three articles on RT caught my eye today, vividly illustrating this.

Lesson to learn from GoT: Stories are powerful, be careful which ones you believe

There is one very poignant part in this article:

Orwell’s dystopia takes to its logical extreme the old adage that “history is written by the victors,” but it’s not too far off. Much of Western history about WWII, for example, came from the pen of Winston Churchill, who naturally made sure he was the hero by scrubbing out inconvenient facts like the 1943 Bengal famine or the betrayal of Yugoslavia, for instance.

These narratives were then taken up and amplified by Hollywood, which has from its very beginning manufactured institutional memory for most Americans. As a result of blockbusters like ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ and ‘Band of Brothers’ (another HBO show), the US contribution to defeating Hitler has become grossly inflated in the public mind, not just at home, but abroad as well. Meanwhile, the massive Soviet role in the war has been minimised or erased entirely.

This narrative violation of history made it possible for US President Donald Trump to argue that America single-handedly defeated Nazism and Communism, without a peep from his critics and legions of fact-checkers normally eager to seise every opportunity.

To paraphrase Varys, power is all about perception management.

And right on cue, case in point:

Soviet Union oddly missing from US-made coin ‘saluting’ WWII Allies

After fierce resistance and four years of bloody battles, the Red Army repelled the invasion and liberated Eastern Europe from the Nazi occupation.

In 1945, Soviet soldiers captured Berlin. After the warfare in Europe was over, Moscow agreed to US requests to enter the war against Japan, defeating its forces in Manchuria.

More than 26.6 million Soviet citizens died in the war, with 8.7 million killed in combat.

And yet…

A US-made collectable coin lists Britain and France among the honored US allies in WWII, but, strangely, the Soviet Union, whose Red Army delivered a crushing blow to the Nazis in Europe and fought Japan, is omitted.

I want to round these musings with a news from Sweden, where they are mulling to forbid… Nordic runes:

Swedes up in arms as govt mulls potential ban on ancient ‘Nazi’ runes

First the Rus runes were pushed into oblivion, and now it’s the turn of the Norse runes, and with them even more of our history will be forgotten. Nazis seem to be an awfully convenient excuse to achieve such goals of first maligning and then outright banning the old and venerated symbols, as it’s already been done with the symbol of the “wheel of time” – “kolovrat”.

Western-language words having Slavic/Russian/Rus roots (with future updates)

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For quite a long time I was noticing uncanny similarities between English, Norwegian, German, Spanish and core Russian words. By core words, I mean those that were not recent loan words. (Though even among those there exist examples of the words that were re-introduced into Russian with a different meaning).

A few years ago I started noting down and collecting such words, but it was not until Lada Ray’s forbidden history & forgotten origins webinar that I found the incentive to publish this list. Lada covers many key words that are rooted in Russian. In her latest article, Forbidden History & Linguistics: OLD LADA, The Forgotten First Capital Of Ancient Rus! and Forbidden History & Vedic Truth: Why Greece Is Really Called ELLADA? she adds more important hidden-in-plain-sight connections to the old Russian history.

This article is also a logical continuation of the series of 7 publications which I translated in 2016: Uncovering Slavic/Russian language traces in the European History, and which I invite my visitors to [re]read.

The Scaligerian history, which our present-day world is built upon, is a pretty disjointed affair, with many fragments that do not add up (and not just in history, but also in Astronomy and in Linguistics), yet the court historians are hanging on to the scaligerian chronology with a religious zeal, ostracising any historian daring to question it, and shuffling any finds that contradict it into obscurity. History is thus now the only science that lives by the postulates from several hundreds years ago. It’s the same as if Chemistry today held onto the truths of Alchemy or if Physics still postulated that Earth is the centre of the Universe!

The best correct chronology has been built in the works of two Russian mathematicians A.T.Fomenko, G.V.Nosovsky – it is New Chronology. It accounts for and explains all of the discrepancies that the Scaligerian “official” chronology closes its eyes upon. Please read their short introduction to the History of the New Chronology. Linguistics is a vital part, and the scientists also address it in their book RUSSIAN ROOTS OF THE “ANCIENT” LATIN. The book has “A short dictionary of parallelisms” as one of its chapters. I have not yet had the pleasure to read this book, holding off until I was more or less finished with the collection below, wanting to keep my finding free of influence of other authors. Now that this part of my compilation is done, I will be familiarising myself with their book on this topic.

This is not the first time these parallels were noticed and attempted systematised. When Linguistics was still a young science, the following book was published in Russia in 1842: “The Root-worder of the Russian language, compared to the all main Slav dialects and to twenty-four foreign languages”. (The site of “V Ladu s Mudrost’ju” (“in accord with wisdom”) holds a lot of download links to the old printed Russian books, and those from 1700s onwards are pretty easy to read for a modern Russian.) The “Root-Worder” is built as a dictionary with very thorough research and referencing for every word.

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“So many? Really?” Germans do not know how many Russians were killed by their ancestors

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In 2015 I translated Georgy Zotov’s article Repentance of Berlin. After 70 years, the Germans have an unambiguous attitude towards the Soviet victory.

This year it elicited the following comment:

LaRock on March 6, 2019 at 19:50 said:
The war is over stop punishing Germany

To which I replied:

Stanislav on March 12, 2019 at 20:02 said:
This comment should be addressed to the USA, who are still occupying and punishing Germany. If you read the article, you’d see that it’s about remembrance and reconciliation.

However, a better reply would have been a translation of an even earlier article by Zotov, one from 2013. I am translating it below, followed by a translation of two reader comments from AiF and my thoughts on them and what Zotov wrote in one particular paragraph.

Today, with racism and calls to war and genocide being the norm on the pages of the Western MSM (“racism” is a common-root synonym of “russophobia”) and the number of the Western troops and war hardware right on the Russian border being the highest since the June of 1941, it is time to remember. For while the West is collectively shrugging off 1941-1945 as “just another invasion of Russia” and preparing for a new one, Russia remembers, watches closely and prepares to defend its land once more.

In this today’s context remembrance is the key to preventing another invasion of Russia by the West, and prevent this time hundreds of millions people being killed – both defenders, attackers and bystanders…

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Celebrating the 5th Anniversary of Crimea’s Reunification with Russia

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This March marks 5 years since the people of Crimea overwhelmingly voted in favour of reunification with the rest of Russia. This event was preceded by a violent Western-sponsored coup d’etat in Ukraine, which removed there the legitimate government and left Ukraine without any constitutional government for several months. De facto Ukraine was ruled by the US/EU-approved Ukro-Nazi mob, which saw as its mission eradication of everything Russian in Ukraine. And Crimea stood high on their list of territories to be depopulated from the Russians.

USA had its own interests in Crimea, having scouted it for its new US-NATO military base. Crimea would have become another Kosovo for the US-NATO, Kosovo, which was split off from Serbia in a savage aggression on Yugoslavia by the US-NATO in March 1999 and lead to the establishment one of the largest US-NATO military bases in Europe – Camp Bondsteel, which Graham Phillips documented in his latest reportage.

And then “The Third Siege of Crimea” – as the locals call it, the longest 25-year-long siege, ended and Crimea reunited with its motherland!

The Crimeans overwhelmingly voted for the reunification, exercising their right under the international law and the UN charter of people’s right to self-determination. It was not the first time the Crimeans voted for the reunification, but this time it worked, while in 1991 the results were ignored and suppressed.

Whatever passed between Russia and Ukraine in 1954, it was not sovereignty over Crimea. The Union States did not have sovereignty over the autonomous bodies within them. The USSR had sovereignty over both of them. According to the Constitution the Supreme Soviet would determine the fate of the autonomies if a state seceded.

USSR Law of Secession: “The people residing in the autonomies are given a right to independently decide whether to remain in the Soviet Union or in the seceding Republic as well as to decide on their state legal status.”

Crimean Referendum Jan. 20, 1991: “Do you support re-establishing the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as a subject of the Union SSR and a participant of the Union Treaty?”

— 94.3% yes —

As 2.5 million Crimeans celebrated, the West was gnashing its collective teeth as the loss of a prospective military base for the USA to put their missiles aimed at Moscow. Sanctions followed, trying to punish the Crimeans for their choice. Ukraine, with the Western blessing, blew up the electric power lines as well as left the peninsular without water, leading to a large-scale humanitarian disaster. No-one bombed the Obama regime for organising it, but Russia rather quickly managed to restore both water and power to the peninsular through a dedicated infrastructure bridge.

More sanctions followed from the West. The Russians felts especially betrayed by the Germans – only in 1989 Gorbachev, against the strategic interests of the USSR, and to the hollow NATO promises of “not one inch East of Berlin”, green-lighted the reunification of the German people. And that is how the Germans repaid when the Russian people reunified – by slapping on sanctions.

Time passed, and Russia continued to undo the damage done to Crimea by the 25 years of Ukrainian neglect. They built new infrastructures, built new international airport, built a large mosque for the Crimean Tatars and recognised their language as one of the three official languages in Crimea (something Ukraine promised to do, but never did), they built the miracle of engineering – the Kerch railway and motor bridge, they restored Artec.

Looking back at 2014, when this revival started, I found my copy of Argumenty i Fakty from the 18th of March 2014, which I keep as a valuable memento – akin to how our grandfathers would have kept newspapers announcing the end of WWII. Here is the facsimile of its front page.

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Five Years Later, the Crimean Scythian Gold Worth $4 Million May Fall into Poroshenko’s Hands

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In a twist of fate, just as Crimea returned to Russia after 25 years of Ukrainian oppressive rule, Crimea’s most precious collection of Scythian gold was on tour in European and promptly became arrested by Holland. It is in Holland still, despite several Crimean Museums’ ownership of the collection. After the first hearing in 2016, Holland awarded the golden collection to Ukraine. The decision was appealed, and is now coming for a near hearing in Holland. The following article in Argumenty i Fakty from 12.03.2019 is about this.

The gold that got stuck.
Will Poroshenko get the wealth of the ancient Scythians?

The second trial, which will decide the fate of the exhibits of the Crimean museums, started in Holland.


The gold of the Scythians. © / PHGCOM / Commons.wikimedia.org

Hearings on the case of the “Scythian gold” began on March the 11th in Amsterdam. In 2014, it was taken from the Crimean museums to an exhibition in Amsterdam. After the reunification of Crimea with Russia, the Ukrainian authorities demanded to return the exhibits to Ukraine. In 2016, the district court of Amsterdam ruled in favour of Kiev. Crimean museums have filed an appeal, which will now be considered in court.

Aif.ru answers the main questions about the upcoming process.

What are these gold artefacts?

In February 2014, when Maidan was raging in Kiev, the exhibition “Crimea: Gold and Secrets of the Black Sea” was opened in Amsterdam. It collected the best exhibits from the ‘Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine’, ‘Kerch Historical and Cultural Reserve’, ‘The Central Museum of Tavrida’, ‘Bakhchisarai Historical and Cultural Reserve’ and ‘The National Reserve “Tauric Chersonesos”‘. Amsterdam became another point in the Museums’ “tour” of the collection: before Holland they were exhibited in Bonn, Germany.

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New Year of Peter I and the Roots of Grandfather Frost and Snow Maiden – Their True History

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Some years ago I published an article about the instruction of the Western calendar in Russia by Peter I and the abolishment of the ancient Slavic calendar, counting over 7500 years of history.

While that article is true in all respects, as it is usual with our history, there are even more layers of alterations as one starts delving deeper into a topic. This is also so with the Russian calendar, and the tradition of New year celebration. For those who have not read it, I strongly advise you to read the previous article before continuing with the materials below. There I touch upon the linguistic aspects and two different words for “year” in Russian – “leto” (meaning both “year” and “summer”) and “god” (meaning “year”, with the overt reference to the Dutch word for “God”). In fact the first of the four articles below carries an explanation for why years were counted in summers…

The materials below are comprised of translations of four articles, originally published in “Argumenty i Fakty”, and uncover more details around Peter I reform, then going to the origins of the characters of “(Grand)father Frost” and the “Snow Maiden”. The articles can be read independently, but for a better understanding I would recommend reading them all in order.

Contents:

  1. The Tzar and the Tree. Why Peter I moved New year to January the 1st
  2. Bonfires for the ancestors and the gifts to the terrifying Grandfather. How New Year was celebrated in Russia
  3. Snow-mai-den! The history of the Russian character, which has no analogues
  4. According to Old Style. Why did the New year made do without a Tree

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USA’s plans for the nuclear annihilation of USSR (Russia) and China disclosed

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What does one call a country that plans to kill millions of people in a cold blooded first strike attack, and measures its level of success in the number of civilians killed and the percentage of the civilian infrastructure destroyed, reducing the attacked nation to a non-viable condition?

A rogue state?

A terrorist state?

Actually, it’s called USA.

In the recently-declassified documents, the US military details such plans of an all-out nuclear first strike against the USSR and China. I have written before about the American plans to drops 204 A-bombs onto the 66 of the largest Soviet cities, including Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev… The plans below are shown to go to an even greater detail in actually measuring the level of “success” such an attack would have, in the magnitude of the CIVILIAN casualties.

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“The Great Gas Game” – An Excellent Documentary from Vesti

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The Gas Wars are continuing. Starting well during the time of USSR, when the USA tried to stop the supply of the Russian gas to Europe by the means of sanctions and provocations, through the Ukrainian gas machinations, when Ukraine was used as a patsy to sabotage and undermine Russian supplier reputation, while at the same time blackmailing Russia for cheap under-market-priced gas, which I wrote about in a 2014 article The Third Gas War: EU and US must pay for their “successes” in Ukraine.

Now the USA are trying to sabotage Nord Stream 2 by blackmailing Germany. This follows the successful blackmailing and sabotage of Bulgaria, which stopped the construction of the South Stream and depriving Bulgaria of about $700.000.000 and $800.000.000 per year over a span of 50 years – USA and EU successfully stole from Bulgaria about $37.500.000.000

And before that, USA/NATO invaded and bombed Yugoslavia, bombing into oblivion the gas refinery in the Serbian town of Pacevo in 1999.

All this recent, and not so recent, history is very well chronicled in the new English-subtitled documentary from Vesti: “The Great Gas Game”

UPDATE 2022: Since YouTube applied the “freedom of speech” principle and removed all speech that does not conform to the American directive on freedom, i.e. all Russian channels, including the one from the VGTRK that hosted the documentary, I re-uploaded a backup copy, which I happened to have, to Odysee.

The Clinton – Yeltsin Collusion — How USA Interfered in the Russian Affairs and Elections

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The devastating period of the Wild ’90s during Yeltsin’s reign of chaos, is a topic which I have previously covered on multiple occasions, and which I will be coming back to in the future.

This time, I want to draw your attention to the newly-declassified documents, pertaining to the communications between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin. These documents are especially telling in the current “Russian elections meddling” hysteria, which has engulfed the United States. In a flurry of accusations, backed by so far zero evidence, the US accuses Russia of swaying the public opinion in Trump’s favour by placing a few ads on Twitter. As the Russian saying goes, “a thief is always screaming ‘catch the thief’ loudest of all”. This perfectly illustrates the situation in the USA, in light of their continued and brazen track record of meddling in other states’ affairs, and in this case, specifically the Russian affairs during the Wild ’90s period.

The Clinton Digital Library declassified the Documents Concerning Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

RT made a short digest of 5 highlight points from this 591 page long publication:

‘Smart’ Putin & election loans: 5 must-read Clinton-Yeltsin exchanges released

The exchanges include:

  • Clinton sends ‘his people’ to get Yeltsin elected
  • Yeltsin questions NATO expansion
  • NATO bombing of Yugoslavia turns Russia against the West
  • Yeltsin asks US to ‘give Europe to Russia’
  • Clinton on Putin: ‘He’s very smart’

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Tolkien’s Beorn as a Personification of Russia

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There are times when an article or an idea would sit as a draft for some time before seeing the light of publication, as if waiting for something. This article is of that kind, and it seemed to have been waiting for Lada Ray’s Forbidden History and Forgotten Origins webinars to catalyse me into putting some finishing touches and publishing it.

I first had an inkling of there being a connection between Tolkien’s depiction of Beorn and Rus when I was reading his books. Much later, that feeling returned as I was watching Peter Jackson’s dramatisation of The Hobbit. And the final pieces fell into place, while watching the behind the scenes documentaries on construction of Beorn’s house set and the visualisation of his character. I have created the shortened versions of the two documentaries to showcase the fragments that are especially interesting and telling for the topic at hand:



Before I proceed, let me reference my reader to another article of Lada Ray – Forbidden History: Are Scandinavians Slavs?. Many of the prerequisites are discussed there, so I would be repeating much of that article otherwise.

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UPDATED: Russian Calendar Shows Year 7527, or How Russian History Was Shortened by Peter I

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The article you are about to read appears in Russian on The Svarog Day site (Update: the site went off-line in 2021, so the link is update to point to the WebArchive). Before embarking on it, a short contextual and linguistic introduction is needed.

I have been meaning to translate this article for some time, but as with a few other articles that will be coming out around this time, it did not feel like the time was ripe. It is Lada Ray’s forbidden history & forgotten origins webinar series that are now playing as a certain catalyst. Lada addresses this topic and the historical background behind this transition of the calendar in great detail in her webinar. She also addresses the aspects of a supposed impostor that replaced Peter I, which the article below alludes to. She presents arguments that there was no impostor, but that Peter was swayed in his views by his Western advisors during his travels to the West. Later I plan to do a translation of a film that dives into this topic, but for now, back to the topic of the Calendar.

Another note is the word “calendar”, which in old Russian was “kolo dar”, meaning “the gift of the sun-circle”. Lada Ray wrote an extensive article on this topic in 2015: Why Russians celebrate the New Year, and not Christmas, with New Year’s Tree? The Origin of ‘Calendar’ and Christmas/New Year’s Forbidden History. The article to some degree intersects with what I am about to translate, and it also greatly expands on the meaning of the word “calendar”.

The word “year” in modern Russian is written as “god” (год), and the reason for it will become apparent from the article. However, Russian originally used the word “leto” (лето) to denote “year”. In modern Russian the word “leto” means “summer”, but its original meaning is still preserved in different contexts and words, such as “letopis” (летопись, literally: “year writing”), meaning “chronicles”. “Leto” is also used to denote the age or timespan starting from 5 (it seems the reforms of which the article will talk, were only successfully enforced on short intervals), so you’d say “1 god” (1 year), but “5 let” (5 years).

In my translation I will use “year” for both, but will mark the word with either (god) or (leto) in parenthesis, where the context requires it.

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How the Russian Queen of France Anna Yaroslavna Taught the French to Wash

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This is my translation of an interesting article from the 30th of July 2013, containing a letter from Anna Yaroslavna, Queen of France. The original in Russian can be found at the site of the on-line newspaper The President.

This article goes well along with Lada Ray’s “Forbidden History Forgotten Origins” webinar series, where the line of Rjurik and Anna Yaroslavna are discussed in Webinar 8 “1000 Lost Years & Falsified History”.

I have not verified the authenticity of the letter’s text, though given the other historical accounts of the French court of that time, the letter seems to describe the genuine state of affairs. I’ll try researching more into Anna’s letters at a later point.

An English translation of this personal old-Slavic text cannot convey all the emotions and colloquialisms, but should be read as the best approximation.

A Russian girl, Anna Yaroslavna – the Queen of France. She carried out a revolution in a foreign country. It was she who taught the French court to read and write in the XI century. She introduced the French to the bath and forced them to use fork and knife during meals. Anna kept up a correspondence with the Pope. Subjects of a foreign for her France worshipped Anna and called her Red Agnes.

The TV series “In Search of Truth” on STB TV channel with the host Vyacheslav Garmash is dedicated to this topic.

Anna Yaroslavna (also known as Anne of Kiev in the West) signed her name as “Анна Ръина” – “Anna Rhine”. Some translate this from the French “roi”, “Queen Anne”, which is wrong. The word “Ръина” – Rina – should be translated from the old Russian “Ra”, which means, well, “Russian”, (tl. note: or “light”) or “Queen”, which is the same.

Anna was born around 1024. At that time all of Rus was literate. Let us, for example, remember the birch bark letters of that time, of which many have been found. Anna was the youngest of three daughters of Knyaz (King) Yaroslav the Wise of Kiev, wife of French king Henry I, and Queen of France.

Anna grew up at the King’s court in Kiev and received good education. On may the 19th of 1051 she married the widowed Henry I, from whom she later had children.

And so, a very interesting letter from Anna Yaroslavna.


“Hello, my beloved father! Greetings to you, King of all Russia, from your faithful daughter Anya, Anna Yaroslavna Ruricovich, and now the Queen of France. And where did you send me, a sinner? To such a stinking hole, to France, to Paris-town, wishing to never have set my eyes on it!

You said the French are smart, while they don’t even know about the stoves. As the winter starts, they stoke the open hearths. From them soot fills the whole Palace, smoke in the whole room, and not a droplet of heat. I only find refuge here in the Russian beavers and sables. I once called theirs masons, and began to explain what a stove is. I drew and sketched, but to no avail – they do not understand, and that’s it. “Madam,” they say, “it’s impossible.” I answer: “Do not be lazy, go to Russia, we have a stove in every wooden hut, not to speak of the stone chambers.” And they say to me: “Madam, we do not believe. A house with a small chamber filled with fire, and there are no fires? Oh, non-non!” I swore that’s true. They say, “You, Russ, are barbarians, Scythians, Asians, that’s your witchcraft. Madame, see that you don’t tell this to anyone but us, or else both you and we will be burnt at the stake!»

And do you know what they eat, daddy? You won’t believe it – frogs! Even our common folk would be ashamed to put such things into their mouth, while here the dukes and duchesses not only eat them, but at the same time praise them. And they eat “côtelettes”. They would take a piece of meat, beat it with a hammer, fry and eat it.

The Byzantine spoons are still new to them, while they’ve never seen the Venetian forks. I once prepared for my husband, king Henry, the kurnik (translator note: a variaty of a large royal Russian pie, traditionally stuffed with chicken, duck, buckwheat porridge, potatoes and nuts – a few recipes here). He licked his hands. “Anchor! — he cried – More!” I made him some more. He screamed again, ” Anchor!” I said to him: “You stomach will ache!” He asks:” Kes-ke-se? — What is it?” I explained to him according to [the writings of] Claudius Galen. He says, ” You’re a blackbooker (witch)! See that you don’t tell anyone or the Pope will have us burnt at the stake.”

Another time I say to Henry: “Let me teach your clowns to perform ‘Alexandria’.” He replies: “And what is it?” I say, “the history of the wars of Alexander the Great.” — “Who is he?” Well, I explained to him in accordance with [the writings of] Antisthenes the Younger. He told me: “Oh, non-non! It’s incredible! One person cannot conquer so many countries!” Then I showed him the book. He grimaced and said, “I am not a priest to read so much! In Europe, no king can read. Don’t show this to anyone or my Dukes and Counts will promptly stab you with the daggers!” That’s the life here, father.

And also, Saracens came to us. No one, except me, could speak the tongue of the Saracens, so the Queen had to become an interpreter, even if the Dukes with Counts where gnashing their teeth. Yet this is something that I am not afraid of – my Varjags are always with me. Something else is scary. These Saracens invented al’kugl (Arab. — alcohol), it’s stronger than even our beer and mead, not speaking of the Polish water.

And this is why I am writing to you, father, so that not a single barrel of this al’kugl is allowed into Russia. God forbid! That will be the death to the Russian folk. And with this I bow to you in farewell, being thy true daughter Anna Yaroslavna Ruricovich, and by husband, Anna Regina Francorum.”

Such letters wrote the Russian Queen back home to Russia.

The ”Wild ’90s” in Russia, more memories

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I’ve written several posts on the topic of the devastating “Wild ’90s” in Russia. What I find to be very important is the preservation of the peoples memories of that tragic era. Already there are signs that it has become etched in the Russian “gene pool” on the same level as the Time of Trouble of 1599, the Borodino battle of The Great Patriotic War of 1812 and the memories of The Second Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, along with many other historic turning point events – both in hardship and happiness.

I wrote a translation of one such recollection in the article The ”Wild ’90s” in Russia, as reflected in people’s memory and in the second part of the testimonials translations. Here is another characteristic story from Ankdot.ru site, New Year-themes, yet sad and bittersweet. The author is maybe a little younger than myself. After the main translation, I will present some select comments to the post with more memories of that terrible and confusing time.

The original can be found here.

THE GRANDSON OF SANTA CLAUS

This was inspired by the stories about Santa Claus. A fair warning: it will not be fun. As I remember, my childhood was a happy one though it can hardly be called rich. First came the “perestroika”, then the “fun” of the 90s. My father had died, mother was a kindergarten teacher with a salary equivalent of 10 pounds of buckwheat a month (those who remembers 1992-1993 – he will understand). And all this against the background of the emerging abundance of imported goods. Kids today won’t understand what it was like in the early 90-ies to eat Snickers on a school break or go outside with a cassette tape recorder. As you can gather, with a monthly budget of 10 pounds of buckwheat, Snickers at a break, and especially the tape recorder in the courtyard were not to be dreamt of. I knew better, and didn’t even hint about such things.

So when on January 1, 1993 I received Sony Walkman as a gift – I was close to a shock. First, at the time it was better than both iPhone X and Apple Watch combined nowadays. Secondly, I knew that for the next six months the monthly ration of buckwheat would be halved. “Mom, from where?” “Don’t worry, it’s a present from work.” In short, until the summer I was treated at school, if not like a king, then at least as of particular noble bloodline.

And only a few years later did I learned that for the sake of the player, my mom worked part time as a cleaner in the same garden a few months…

Now I’m an adult of about the same age as my mother was back then. I earn more than well. But I cannot get my mom to agree to any expensive purchase (“You need to save money for a new car/apartment/dacha”. Those, who have parents who survived the 90s as adults will understand me). So I every time have to come up with some excuse for where the present came from. Travel package – “Yes, it’s a promo tour from some acquaintances, with a 50% discount, we must take it.” TV – it’s a bonus from the store, the phone – “we can buy it here twice as cheap, than what you have in Russia”. In my experience, what works best is to get tickets to the theatre “for the bonuses of the mobile operator, which will expire if they are not spent now.”

And also now I bought her tickets to the concert in the Kremlin, “tickets from friends, whose firm is sponsoring the concert”, while with tears welling up, in my inner eye I see a 13-year-old glowing from happiness, with a player in his hands.

My dears, my advice to you while it is not too late – please your parents. They, though they are already old, still believe in miracles. And I told you of some modern versions of the “miracles”.