Author Archives: RomanInUkraine

A friend’s FB update from Crimea

1. The light give at 6-9 hours a day.
2. Chongar [entry/exit to Crimea] partially closed and to depart from the peninsula is possible only through krasnoperekopsk.
3. The first channel is off most of the day and night. The greatest tragedy for pensioners [who are generally rapid pro-Putin] and state service.
4. Schools and institutions are not working. And this is, by the way, plus.
5. Entrepreneurs cleaned out generators. If you have any problems with petrol or with delivery of new generators, trade will exist only in the afternoon. Supermarkets are already working only part of the day.
6. protests lorry drivers, together with the “blockade” Crimea really can turn dtz in the island of Crimea.
7. Entrepreneurs have continued to flee from Crimea.
8. Crimeans jump for Putinist, when the latter rejoiced that Kiev without Russian gas in winter freezes over. However, there is no light without heating. In other words, it is the crimeans are at risk of freeze in the winter, if the energy embargo will continue.
9. In the shops people are buying up tablets, laptops and the flash drives.
10. Many crimeans are continue to love Putin, because “grandfathers tolerated and we tolerate”.

***

На многочисленные вопросы “Ну как там в Крыму?” отвечаю:

1. Свет дают на 6-9 часов в день.
2. Чонгар частично закрыт и выехать с полуострова можно только через Красноперекопск.
3. Первый канал выключен большую часть дня и вечера. Самая большая трагедия для пенсюков и госслужбы.
4. Школы и институты не работают. И это, кстати, плюс.
5. Предприниматели раскупили генераторы. Если возникнут проблемы с бензином или с доставкой новых генераторов, торговля будет существовать только днём. Супермаркеты уже работают лишь часть дня.
6. Протесты дальнобойщиков вместе с “блокадой” Крыма реально могут превратить Полуостров Крым в Остров Крым.
7. Предприниматели продолжают бежать из Крыма.
8. Крымчане, скакавшие за Путина, когда-то радовались, что Киев без российского газа зимой замерзнет. Однако без света нет отопления. Иными словами, именно крымчане рискуют замерзнуть зимой, если энергетическая блокада продолжится.
9. В магазинах массово раскупают планшеты, ноутбуки и флешки.
10. Многие крымчане продолжают любить Путина, потому что “деды терпели и мы потерпим”.

NATO’s Standoff with the USSR over Yugoslavia

Stalin felt threatened by Tito’s effectiveness and support for Greek communists. He wanted to depose Tito. There were proxy wars, border incursions, assassination attempts, and 80,000-soldier military drills. There were enormous purges of spies or suspected spies with many people getting executed. In the Eastern block, the “Titoists” became the enemy of the day for a while.

NATO decided to defend Tito, even though he was communist because Yugoslavia was a buffer to Italy and Greece. Starting in 1950, NATO provided military aid and drafted a plan to make their line of defense of Europe within the territory of Yugoslavia.

http://romaninukraine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Dodging_Armageddon.pdf

Eric Homberger’s shameful obituary of Robert Conquest

The ridicule of Conquest is buried in the obituary, but it’s there.

He was a vigorous polemicist, arguing on numerous occasions (perhaps a few times more than was strictly necessary) the many failings of socialist and Marxist thought, as in Where Marx Went Wrong (1970). He later called Marxism a “misleading mental addiction”. Conquest was seldom happier than when refuting western admirers of the Soviet Union, such as EH Carr and Eric Hobsbawm, but often seemed to be addressing audiences who needed little by way of nuance or documentation.

His work makes references to “some circles” and their grievous misunderstandings, and much worse, needs proper sourcing of quotations. But Conquest rather grew out of that kind of thing after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the footsteps of Stalin’s purge prosecutor, he could be a proper little Vyshinsky when dealing with fellow travellers.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/05/robert-conquest

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More criticism here: http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/robert-fulford-leftist-delusions-of-soviet-horrors

When a mass grave was revealed in Kolpashevo, Siberia in 1979 — A story about Soviet man. A story about Russia.

(Jesus Christ…. This is disturbing. Westerners have no freaking idea about the dark depths of Russian nihilism. They have no idea what they’re dealing with.)

This is a story about the Soviet man. It’s about our compatriots and our countrymen, and our brothers and our sisters. It is a story about the way of life in Siberia. It’s about the moral code of the Builder of Communism.

In 1979, a river in a Siberian town began exposing a mass grave.

Then from Tomsk came new orders containing an interesting, ingenious engineering solution. Up the Ob, they dispatched two powerful tugboats and sent them right up to the riverbank, where there were tied with ropes to the shore, facing the ships away from the land. Then they set their engines on full throttle. The waves from the ships’ propellers began to erode the cliff, and bodies started falling into the water, where most of them were cut to pieces by the same propellers. The crew working these tugboats was made up of ordinary civilians. Nobody selected these men specifically for this task. Nobody switched the crew.

The people of Kolpashevo watched the whole operation with interest. No one protested.

Then it turned out that some of the bodies had washed away downstream, escaping the propellers. The mummified corpses managed quite well in the water, floating not sinking. So down the river they stationed a row of motorboats, where people sat with fishing hooks. Their job was to catch the bodies in the water. These people were volunteers, recruited from the local male population: laborers, public servants, and the so-called workers’ intelligentsia. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory came up to the boats. The men were to tie pieces of scrap metal wire to the bodies they caught and then sink them in the deepest part of the river. This work went on for several days.

The people of Kolpashevo kept watching the tugboats and their propellers thrashing in the water. The tugboats had to be refueled with diesel regularly: all together, each ship burned through about 60 tons of fuel. Nobody was particularly surprised or outraged.

The last team—also composed of local volunteers—worked a bit farther downstream: people on motorboats rounded the shores, collecting the bodies that slipped through the row of boats higher up the river. Some of these remains they buried on shore (in unmarked graves), but more often they buried them in the river, smashing the bones with their oars, or sinking the bones by tying them to stones. This cleanup continued almost until the end of the summer.

Life in Kolpashevo that summer, generally speaking, was calm. It was like it always was. And that’s the story.

. . . . On the banks of the Ob River, directly across from Lenin Street in the center of Kolpashevo, to this day there is still a long triangular cavity preserved in the sandbank. For some reason, the river doesn’t wash it away.

https://globalvoices.org/2015/11/05/russia-the-remarkable-forgotten-story-of-how-a-soviet-town-disposed-of-its-dead/

Patrick J. Buchanan quotes Putin on state sovereignty (without irony!)

Patrick J. Buchanan quotes Putin on state sovereignty (without irony!):

—Putin concept of “state sovereignty” is this: “We are all different, and we should respect that. No one has to conform to a single development model that someone has once and for all recognized as the right one.”—

From Ukraine, where I live, (and probably also from Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Georgia, Moldova, Mongolia, China), Patrick Buchanan seems like he’s joined the lunatic fringe.

http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-mind-of-mr-putin

The Worst Nuclear Testing You’ve Never Heard Of

From 1949 to 1989, the USSR secretly conducted over 400 nuclear tests in Kazakhstan, exposing 200,000 to dangerous levels of radiation.

You already know that the United States and Russia have nuclear weapons. In total, nine countries have an estimated 16,000 warheads. Still, the U.S. and Russia own about 90 percent of the total.

http://seekernetwork.com/thishappenedhere/the-worst-nuclear-testing-you-ve-never-heard-of

Hundreds of desperate letters written to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the 1940s and 1950s have been found in Moldova’s National Archive.

Hundreds of desperate letters written to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the 1940s and 1950s have been found in Moldova’s National Archive. Faced with starvation and deportation, many Moldovan families appealed directly to Stalin for help.

http://www.rferl.org/media/video/moldova-lost-letters-to-stalin/27283399.html