Tag Archives: Russia

Everything about Russia in all its incarnations through the centuries – Rus Tzardom, Russian Empire, USSR, Rusian Federation.

“Kill the Russians.” 105 years ago, the Finnish army staged the massacre in Vyborg. The truth must come out!

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This year there is an anniversary of a dark page in Finish history that Finland studiously ignores – the genocide of the Russian population of Vyborg in 1918. Not only does Finland ignore it, but as was mentioned earlier in the article More on the Finnish finishing NATO move, they are actually proud of it, having release a commemorative 1 Euro coin celebrating the genocide…

In the Soviet Union this topic was “shoved under the rug” for the sake of the good neighbourly relations. Much like one did not talk at all about the part played by Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania in the WWII on the German Nazi side.

But times are changing. Ukraine turning Nazi, committing a massacre of their own in Odessa on the 2nd of May 2014, and Finland now openly supporting the Kiev regime and showing hostility towards Russia, opens up the doors for the truth to be spoken, neigh, shouted!

Below is a translation of an article published in “Argumenty i Fakty” on the 29th of April 2023.

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“Bukvar” – Learn the Russian alphabet like a 7-year-old native!

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The question of learning the Russian alphabet – or Azbuka, as it’s called in Russian – is one that occasionally pops up.

At the first glance, it may appear hard – 33 letters, half of which are unfamiliar or have a different reading from Latin. But that’s only at the first glance. The first-graders in Russia can do it, and so can you! 😁

Enter “Bukvar” – the letter learning book for the afore-mentioned first-graders. Its approach is to present letters not in the alphabetical order, but rather in such a way that new letters can be combined with the ones already learned to build more and more complex words and sentences. That way the learner builds associations between the shapes of the letters and the sounds they make in the words.

A foreign student can draw on most of this methodology. One part of the learning process that will require a work-around is the expected native-speaker fore-knowledge of how certain words sound.

After a very short introduction on the linguistic notation used in the book, the plan is to present one new letter per day, with the explanations of the reading and of the example images used in Bukvar – this will be a great opportunity to learn new words while connecting the new letters to a context.

This image covers the symbology. It’s something you can come back to as a reference throughout the book.

Another aspect of learning new letter is writing. Though few of us actually write using a pen nowadays, when learning new letters, writing makes for a good additional venue of memorisation – you start associating hand movements and strokes with the shapes of the letters. Here are two writing templates used by schoolchildren in conjunction with Bukvar’. I managed to find the versions that I myself used in the distant 1980s 😁

Template 1 — Template 2 (the 1985 edition, originally found here)

You can skip over the first 4 pages (they tackle hand coordination and fine motion of writing) and start on page 5, practising the letters as they come.

Another letter recognition aid that I created for this course is the complete alphabet, where each letter is shown using several different typefaces, some closer to the printed version of the letter, and some – to the handwritten one. The images from this aid will be given as we learn each new letter, but you can download the whole set for future reference.

Don’t try to take it in all at once, but rather take one letter per day, and play with it.

And now, imagine, that you have just come to your first day at school – on the 1st of September – and are getting into the learning mood by leafing through the first pages of Bukvar, thinking how wonderful it will be to when you can read all the words…

To help you get into the mood, here are two postcards – from 1956 and 1959 – greeting you on the 1st of September!



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What the Third Reich planned to do with the Soviet population in case of a victory

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Below is a translation of a short and concise article on the Nazi German plans regarding the occupied territories of the USSR – in the first place, those of Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia. They didn’t wait for the victory, but started implementing this plan right away as they occupied new lands, so they German actions spoke louder, than any documents – surviving or not.

It is worth mentioning here two quotes from the Danish press, which are reprints of the German publications of the time:

2nd of September 1941.

–––work is now being done to save the harvest on the conquered territory. A German army commander has issued a proclamation to the rural population, in which they are held responsible for ensuring that the crops are not destroyed.

30th of November 1941.

From the German side, as is also evident from the wording of the army report, they make no secret of the fact that the war of extermination, which they now intend to unleash against Rostov, is directly aimed at the city’s civilian population.

And then re-reading the following article: The Great Patriotic War in Ukraine. A historical retrospective by Rostislav Ischenko, in which the author tells of the Nazi German occupation of Ukraine, quoting what his grandmother told him of that time.

As further reading, there is a more detailed article (in Russian) General Plan “Ost”: What awaited the Peoples of the USSR after the Victory of the Nazis?

Now, to the grand Nazi German plan at hand, a plan that, thankfully was stopped in its tracks by the Soviet Union.

What the Third Reich planned to do with the Soviet population in case of a victory

February 3, 2021

Long before the invasion of the USSR, the leadership of the Third Reich knew what it would do with the occupied territories and their population. Hitler had a grandiose goal – to forever turn Germany into the strongest country in the world. The resources captured in the USSR were to serve this purpose: minerals, fertile lands and free labour.

Hitler and his strategists planned, as a result of the blitzkrieg, to reach the “A-A” line (“Arhangelsk – Astrahan”) in the autumn, to establish and strengthen the new border of the Reich on it (mainly along the Volga line). In subsequent years, they wanted to advance it to the Urals.

Leave 25% of the Slavic population as a labour force

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“The Murder of Yugoslavia. The Shadow of Dayton.” A Documentary by Alexei Denisov with English subtitles.

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In 2015 the Russian news agency VGTRK release a documentary “The Murder of Yugoslavia. The Shadow of Dayton.” Back then I wrote about it in Two Documentaries: “Murder of Yugoslavia” and “Democracy of Mass Destruction”, and also translated the summary, but did not undertake the translation of the documentary itself. With the parallels in today’s Ukrainian conflict and NATO’s role in it, this documentary has become even more current than in 2015. In addition, with YouTube blocking the VGTK channel in lieu of the West’s crack-down on the freedom of speech and democracy, the original untranslated documentary became impossible to watch even in Russian.

But before we proceed to the documentary, there is another material that provides additional context and outlines many parallels with the civil war in Ukraine.

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The Murder of Yugoslavia. The Final Acts. Abduction of Milosevic to the Hague.

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While working on the translation of the documentary “The Murder of Yugoslavia. The Shadow of Dayton.”, I’ve come across several materials that strongly resonate both with the documentary, and the events that are unfolding around NATO’s war in Ukraine, accompanied by the customary blame-shifting. Not least is the farce around the ICC Kangaroo Court in the Hague and their illegitimate arrest warrant against the President of the Russian Federation.

Below is a translation of an article from 2021 that looks at how Serbia, after if was “brought to heel” by incessant NATO bombing of its civilian population, abducted and handed over Slobodan Milosevic to that very same Kangaroo Court, and what rewards awaited the miscreant, who organised the abduction.

The reward in the form of a bullet. How Serbia handed over President Milosevic to The Hague

28.06.2021
Andrey Sidorchik

Milosevic out. Russia is next in the cross-hairs.

In the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Yugoslavia was one of the most successfully developing countries in Europe. Having found its niche between the East and the West, the state under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito confidently pursued its independent course.

The Time of Decay

However, Tito’s death was the beginning of a deep crisis that led in 1990 to the victory of the nationalists in the elections of the Yugoslav republics, who set a course for the destruction of a unitary state. The successors of the founder of the socialist Yugoslavia did not have his political weight to effectively resist destructive forces. In addition, the nationalists were actively supported by the countries of the West.

The breakup of Yugoslavia resulted in a bloody civil war that lasted for several years.

In 1995, under the auspices of the United States, the so-called Dayton Agreements were signed between President of Bosnia and Herzegovina Aliya Izetbegovic, President of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic and President of Croatia Franjo Tudjman. In fact, they recorded the defeat of the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs, who fought for the preservation of the right to self-determination and accession to Yugoslavia, which by that time only Serbia and Montenegro remained part of.

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The use of Swastika in the pre-Revolution Russia and the early USSR, before it was defiled by the Nazi Germany

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The article you are about to read is an important historical look at a symbol that in 1930s got co-opted and defiled by the Nazi Germany – the Swastika.

As a disclaimer, this article (or, rather, a translation from Russian of fragments of three articles) is by no means an endorsement of Nazism, and looks at the history of the symbol prior to it being hijacked by the Nazis in Germany, specifically, its use in Russia before the Revolution, and in the first two decades of 1900s. Actually, what the Nazi Germany did, was to perform a cultural appropriation and a desecration of a symbol used by other peoples.

The fate of that symbol is not dissimilar to what we are experiencing now with another symbol, that of a carefree childhood – the rainbow.

First is a translation of an shorter article that serves as a good introduction to the topic, and debunks one fake that managed to sneak in among the facts. After that will come a somewhat longer article about the use of Swastika in the Kalmyk divisions in the early days of the USSR, and finally, a lengthy and well-research article will round off the series, looking at the traditional Russian culture of the past centuries and to the period of the early USSR. it also debunks a misconception of the difference between the left-bent and right-bent swastikas. The articles are somewhat overlapping.

Where did the order of the Red Army with a Swastika appeared from?

It was Hitler who turned the swastika into a symbol of Nazism. At the beginning of the XX century, the symbol was perceived in a completely different way.
To “kolovrats” with four beams were even present on chevrons and banknotes in the RSFSR.

Were the orders with swastikas really made in the RSFSR in the 30s of the XX century, or were the awards a skillful fake? What other countries actively used the swastika before the outbreak of World War II?

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What is the origin of the word “Moskal”

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Ukrainians try to insult Russians in general by using the words “Moskal”, thinking that Russians would take offence with it. Far from being offensive, the word has several historical roots or versions of its origin. What Russians may find offensive is the tone the word is spoken with, much like someone make insult out of, say, the word “Londoner” by simply adding a tonal change to their voice.

Below is a translation of a short article that looks into what “Moskal” really meant…

Where did the unpleasant word “Moskal” come from

08 July 2021

Can a swear word have many meanings? Very often, yes, depending on the context. But today we are offering you you not to study profanity in all its diversity with us, but to get acquainted with the origin of one controversial and very ambiguous word — “Moskal”. We will find out what mushrooms, soldiers, merchants who have lost their shame and insects have to do with it.

This word was often used – and is still used – by the other Slavic peoples to refer to Russians, with a negative semantic connotation. One could call someone “Moskal” to offend, or to express their disdainful and contemptuous attitude. We suggest not to be offended, but to study other meanings of this word.

A soldier

Vladimir Dahl wrote in his famous dictionary back in the time that soldiers were called “Moskals”. And again with a negative connotation. Why? Oftentimes the military, due to the lack or absence of barracks and food, stopped for a stay with local residents. Such an additional “load” in the form of young men with an excellent appetite, eating up all the supplies, and even wanting to flirt with the owner’s wife or daughters, was of no joy to anyone. And considering that the soldiers and officers who needed to be fed and cared for came from the capital, they were nicknamed “moskals”.

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Commemorative Exhibition – 80 Years of The Battle of Stalingrad

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Today is the 80th anniversary since the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, when on the 2nd of February 1943 the world saw the turning point in the course of The Great Patriotic War – the Second World War.

This blog marks the occasion with a series of historic flashbacks, found on the pages that can be accessed either through the top menu or by diving into the link below!

Battle of Stalingrad 1943-2023

Named Родина-мать зовёт! — Rodina-Mat’ zovyot! — The Motherland Calls!
The statue on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd, Russia, commemorating the Battle of Stalingrad with Nazi Germany.
Photo: Kim Lau

A letter from grandfather “Tiger” to his grandson “Leopard”, sent to Ukraine

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This humorous continuity, or historical parallel that there’s been so many of lately caught my eye on the TopWar site. So, without further ado, here is a translation that tries to preserve the wit of the original.

A letter from grandfather “Tiger” to his grandson “Leopard”, sent to Ukraine

24.01.2023

Grandfather and grandson

Guten morgen, mein lieber grandson! I am infinitely glad that you decided to continue “Drang nah Osten”. The Russians have a lot of good fertile land. But for some reason they cling to, and do not want to give it to us, the Aryans. After all, only we are able to administrate this wild land and the barbarians that inhabit it.

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Rostislav Ischenko on the Anti-Russian Racism: Operation “Derusification” or a global attempt to abolish the Russians

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It has been a while since I last translated an article by Rostislav Ischenko. In the past I translated such articles as The Great Patriotic War in Ukraine. A historical retrospective by Rostislav Ischenko and Ukraine celebrated its independence – from what?. His political and historical analysis largely centres around Ukraine and the parallels of the present-day historical process to those of the past. Recently he published a number of articles that were mostly of interest to the domestic reader. The one you are about to read now, however, touches upon the wider theme of the anti-Russian racism that has engulfed and consumed the Western world.

Cemetery near Paris: Operation “Derusification” or a global attempt to abolish the Russians

Rostislav Ishchenko, Columnist of MIA “Russia Today”
January 16, 2023

The French authorities are hypocritically sad to announce that they will be forced to close the Russian cemetery in Saint-Genevieve-de-Bois, since Russia has stopped paying for its maintenance. However, Russia stopped paying because the French authorities stopped accepting payments as part of the imposed sanctions.

Saint-Genevieve-de-Bois is a monument to Russian emigration. Emigrants of the Civil War era of the early twentieth century, and then the emigrants of all the subsequent waves are buried there. In addition to Drozdovsky and Drozdov’s followers, Alekseev and Alekseev’s followers, Rodzianko, Yusupov, Grand Duke Gabriel Konstantinovich, Bunin and Gippius, Galich and Nuriev, Taffy and Tarkovsky, Lifar and Merezhkovsky lie there.

This cemetery is a monument to the Russian history of the twentieth century, with all its problems and contradictions. But at the same time it is a monument to the Russians who did not get along in Russia. Some being the losers of the Civil War, some – of the political struggle, whether they left Russia in search of a better life or professional self-realization. But it is also a monument to the Russian culture in its highest manifestations, in which sense it constitutes the integral part of the world culture.

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A short history of Russian America – the gain and loss of California and Alaska

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With all the talks of various reparations, territorial claims and such, I is both interesting and educational to remember the history the the Russian America, and remind certain actors that if the legality of other past documents can be brought into question, so can the sale of Alaska and California.

Below are several articles from “Argumenty i Fakty” that take a look at that history and mull over what could have been done differently. The last article in the series is illustrative of the battle with the monuments in the “Woke-Woke West” as a manifestation of a brainless demolition of history.

Table of contents:

Kindness, “kushka” and “luzhka”. What kind of memory did the Russians leave in California

11.09.2022

An Orthodox chapel in Fort Ross.Orthodox chapel in Fort Ross. / Frank Schulenburg / Commons.wikimedia.org

200 years ago, on the 11th of September 1812, the official opening of the Russian colony in California, founded back in March, was marked with cannon and rifle salute. It remained nameless all the preceding months and received the name only six months later. The Russian fortress “by drawing of a lot before the icon of the Saviour” was named Fort Ross.

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Happy New Year from the USSR! Postcards of the Bygone Era

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With the New Year coming up, it is time to look hopefully into the coming year and to send someone you love a post card with the best wishes. For me, few modern cards come close to the personality and warmth eminating from the vintage cards. In my family’s archive there are a number of such cards, that were collected by my grandparents from the time even before my mother was born.

Inspired by the article 15 nostalgic Soviet New Year postcards in Russia Beyond the Headlines and by a Telegram post showing how “In the city of Sovetsky, bus stops were decorated with drawings from old Soviet postcards.”, I started scanning this festive part of the collection.

Each postcard is represented with both the face and reverse sides, in the original, aged, paper colour and with the white balance restored (see the links under each picture for the additional versions). The cards are indexed by the year they were approved from printing, meaning that they were used to congratulate people with the next, coming, year.

1952-1953

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Bahmut or Artyomovsk? A historical look at the name of the city

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The battles for Bahmut/Artyomovsk have been raging for some time, the city becoming the focal point of defence the the Ukrainians were building up over the last 8 years, while hiding under the fig leaf of the Minsk peace accord. The Western/Ukrainian publications stick to the name Bahmut as a true “Ukrainian” one. (Incidentally, the name Bahmut has a Turkic sound to it.) The Russian side sticks with Artyomovsk. The article that I am going to translate below looks at the history of the name, and may be an eye-opened for both parties.

And so, the article in question, published in Deita.ru on the 26th of December 2022. Note that the names may alternatively be transliterated as Bakhmut and Artyomovsk.

Bahmut or Artyomovsk? What is wrong with the city’s name?

The conflict in Ukraine is being fought not only on the battlefield – with artillery and missiles, but also in the information space, where symbolism becomes the main weapon. The city of Bahmut, where fierce battles continue, has become a mini-field of a global information and semantic struggle. The Ukrainian modern name of the city is Bahmut, while Russian media and bloggers persistently use the Soviet toponym Artyomovsk.

This material of IA DEITA.RU is about where both names of the city came from, why the heated argument, and what is the problem with the position of our information attack.

Bahmut vs Artyomovsk

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An Honest Deal. How Peter I Bought the Baltic Territories from Sweden. With a bonus about an earlier purchase of Kiev.

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Seeing how the Baltic states (and Ukraine) jumped on the anti-Russian bandwagon, it is worth taking a historical detour into the not so distant past and take a look at a certain fact that those states are trying to erase…

First is a translation of an article from a St.Petersburg edition of “Argumenty i Fakty”, followed by fragment of a related historical article, and concluding with an even deeper dive to the time of the purchase of Kiev from Poland. What is common for these two cases is the fact, that Russia chose to buy the territories at a fair price, despite it having a position of a war winner, enabling it to “just take” those lands. Another aspect of that history is, well, a historical parallel that no one among the Western leadership wants to learn from, maybe because they have not studied history at school.

A fair deal. How Peter I bought the Baltic States from Sweden

Weekly magazine “Arguments and Facts” No. 35. Arguments and facts – Petersburg 31/08/2022


Peter the Great announces the Peace of Nystad (Nishtadt) on Trinity Square in St. Petersburg

The destruction of the monuments to the Soviet soldiers in the Baltic states drew the attention of the Russian society, and at the same time reminded of how these territories came to be a part of the Russian state.

The Northern Russian-Swedish War was concluded on September 10, 1721 with the signing of the Peace of Nystad (Nishtadt), as a result of which Peter the Great actually bought Livonia and Estlandia (modern Latvia and Estonia) from the Swedish Kingdom. Why did the tsar still decide to pay for the territories that were by that time already under the control of the Russian army?

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“Fainting Piglet”, aka. “Unconscious Piggy” Satirical Cartoons Explain the Core of Ukraine and Why SMO Was Unavoidable (with future updates)

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In the August of 2022 the CGI animator Evgenia from Krasnodar Krai started creating something that grew into an in-depth satirical reviews of all what was failing Ukraine, and explaining the Special Military Operation’s goals.

The character personifying Ukraine became a little wayward, Nazi-tainted piglet. The Russian title of the series is “Свинка в обмороке” (Svinka v obmoroke), which is a play on the shortened name of the Special Military Operation (SMO) – SVO in Russian. In English the series have got several varying names, trying to convey the essence: “Unconscious Piggy”, “Fainting Piglet”, “Piglet in a Swoon”, “Swooning Pig”.

All episodes are released at the official Telegram channel of the Fainting Piglet. Evgenia writes in the description: “The Piglet is not the whole of Ukraine, but only her demented part!” I have additionally uploaded them to Yandex Disk for easy download.

While the later episodes were released bilingually, earlier episodes require translation (and most of them also require some context for the Western audience, who have been subjected to the heavy Mains Stream Media censorship). This honourable task was undertaken by the admin of The Putinger’s Cat Telegram channel.

As more and more episodes get release and translated, they are becoming increasingly more difficult to trace. And, additionally, not everyone has Telegram. That is why I decided to upload them to Odysee and create this collated post that will get updates as new episodes see the light of day.

But first, a very short clip that cuts to the chase, and shows the very essence of the conflict and the role Ukraine plays in it!

The very first Unconscious Pig episode – “What is Russia Punishing Ukraine For?” or “Why do Russians support the SMO?” – is finally translated! (Translation at Putinger’s Cat)

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