Category Archives: nationalism

by Joel | 18 June 2026 · 12:19 am

Rus’ Elites Lose to Poland-Lithuania

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 105-107:

FROM THE VIEWPOINT of the Rus’ elites of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the unions with the Kingdom of Poland had caused nothing but trouble. The immediate outcome of the Union of Kreva was the loss of Rus’ influence on the grand prince, who not only moved out of the duchy but also became a Catholic, setting a precedent for his brothers, some of whom were Orthodox. The Orthodox hierarchs’ hope of establishing Byzantine rather than Latin Christianity in the last pagan realm in Europe were dashed.

But the real challenge to Rus’ political status came in 1413, when the Union of Horodło, which historiography treats as a dynastic union, enhanced the Union of Kreva, a personal union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Concluded between Jogaila, now king of Poland, and his cousin Vytautas, the grand duke of Lithuania, the new agreement extended many of the rights and privileges of the Polish nobility, including the right to unconditional ownership of land, to the Lithuanian nobility. Close to fifty Polish noble families offered to share their coats of arms with the same number of families from the grand duchy. But there was a catch: only Lithuanian Catholic families were invited to the party. The new rights and privileges were not accorded to the Orthodox elite. This was the first instance of discrimination against the Rus’ elites at the state level. Denied the new privileges, the Orthodox aristocrats were thus barred from holding high office in the central administration of the grand duchy. To add insult to injury, the Union of Horodło came on the heels of the curbing of Rus’ autonomy by one of the authors of the new union, Grand Duke Vytautas, who replaced the prince of Volhynia and rulers of some other lands with his own appointees.

An opportunity for the Rus’ elites to express their unhappiness with this encroachment on their status came soon after Vytautas’s death in 1430. In the succession struggle for the Lithuanian throne, which deteriorated into a civil war, the Rus’ nobles, led by the Volhynian boyars, supported their own candidate, Prince Švitrigaila. His rival, Prince Žygimantas, responded in 1434 by extending the rights and privileges guaranteed by the Union of Horodło to the Orthodox elites of the grand duchy, turning the tide of war in his favor. Although the Rus’ princes and nobles of Volhynia and the Kyiv Land remained suspicious of the intentions of Žygimantas, their support for Švitrigaila declined, allowing the grand duchy to return to a state of relative peace. With religion eliminated as a source of grievance among the Rus’ elites, the Lithuanian court had more room to maneuver in its continuing efforts to restrict the autonomy of the Rus’ lands and principalities.

In 1470, the grand duke and king of Poland, Casimir IV, abolished the last vestige of the princely era: the principality of Kyiv itself. Ten years later, the Kyivan princes conspired to kill Casimir and install one of their candidates, but their plot failed, leading to the arrest of the ringleaders and forcing the other conspirators to flee the grand duchy. With their departure came an end to the last hopes of restoring the way of life associated with the princely traditions of Kyivan Rus’. By the turn of the sixteenth century, not only Ukraine’s political map but also its institutional, social, and cultural landscape showed few traces of the period two centuries earlier when Galicia-Volhynia had striven to throw off Mongol suzerainty and become a fully independent actor in the region. While Rus’ law and language remained well established, they began to lose their previous dominance. These essentials of Rus’ culture could no longer compete with latinizing influences and the Polish language, which took pride of place in the grand duchy after the Union of Kreva.

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Filed under Baltics, democracy, language, nationalism, Poland, religion, Ukraine

by Joel | 17 June 2026 · 8:59 am

Three Polities of Kyivan Rus’

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 83-86:

THE AUTHORS OF the Primary Chronicle (the laborious task of recording events and commenting on them passed from one generation of monks to another) had to reconcile three different historical identities in their narrative: the Rus’ identity of the Scandinavian rulers of Kyiv, the Slavic identity of the educated elites, and local tribal identity. While the Kyivan rulers and their subjects adopted the name Rus’, the Slavic identity associated with that name, not the Scandinavian one, became the basis of their self-identification. Most subjects of the Rurikids, who ruled their realm from the Slavic heartland, were Slavs. More importantly, the dissemination of Slavic identity beyond the Kyiv region was closely associated with the acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium and the introduction of Church Slavonic as the language of the liturgy, sermons, and intellectual discourse of Rus’. Christianity appeared in both the Slavic and non-Slavic parts of the Kyivan realm in the garb of Slavic languages and Slavic culture. The more Rus’ became Christian, the more it turned Slavic as well. The Kyivan chroniclers incorporated local history into the broader context of the development of the Balkan Slavs and, more broadly still, into the history of Byzantium and world Christendom.

On the local level, tribal identity gave way slowly but surely to identification with local principalities—the centers of military, political, and economic power associated with Kyiv. Chronicle references to the lands surrounding princely towns replaced references to indigenous tribes. Thus, the chronicler refers to the army that sacked Kyiv in 1169 as consisting of people from Smolensk instead of Radimichians, residents of Suzdal instead of Viatichians or Meria, and natives of Chernihiv instead of Siverians. There was a sense of the unity of all the lands under the rule of the Kyivan rulers, and despite conflicts and wars between Rurikid princes, the inhabitants of those lands were considered “ours,” as opposed to foreigners and pagans. The key issue was recognition of the authority of the Rus’ princes, and when some of the Turkic steppe nomads accepted that authority, they became referred to as “our pagans.”

The political and administrative unification of the diverse tribal territories entailed the standardization of their social structure. At its very top were the princes of the Rurikid dynasty, more specifically the descendants of Yaroslav the Wise. Under them were members of the princely retinue—originally Vikings but also increasing numbers of Slavs who merged with local tribal elites to form the aristocratic stratum called the boyars. They were warriors, but in times of peace they administered the realm. The boyars were the main landholding class, and depending on the principality, they had greater or lesser influence on the actions of the prince. Church hierarchs and their servants were also among the privileged.

The rest of the population paid taxes to the princes. The townspeople, who included merchants and artisans, had some political power that they exercised at town meetings, where they decided matters of local governance. Occasionally, as in Kyiv, or quite regularly, as in Novgorod, such meetings influenced the succession of local princes. The peasants, who accounted for most of the population, had no political power. They were divided into free peasants and semifree serfs. The latter could lose their freedom, usually because of debts, and reclaim it once they had paid their debts off or after a certain period. Then there were the slaves—warriors or peasants captured in the course of military campaigns. The enslavement of warriors could be temporary, but that of peasants was permanent.

…

The change in the geopolitical aims of the Kyivan princes, from Yaroslav the Wise to Andrei Bogoliubsky, reflects the reduction of their political loyalties from the entire realm of Kyivan Rus’ to a number of principalities defined by the term “Rus’ Land” and eventually to peripheral principalities that grew strong enough to rival Kyiv in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Historians look to those principality-based identities for the origins of the modern East Slavic nations. The Vladimir-Suzdal principality served as a forerunner of early modern Muscovy and, eventually, of modern Russia. Belarusian historians look to the Polatsk principality for their roots. And Ukrainian historians study the principality of Galicia-Volhynia to uncover the foundations of Ukrainian nation-building projects. But all those identities ultimately lead back to Kyiv, which gives Ukrainians a singular advantage: they can search for their origins without ever leaving their capital.

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Filed under Belarus, economics, labor, language, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, Scandinavia, Ukraine

by Joel | 16 June 2026 · 12:09 am

Volodymyr Goes Full Byzantine

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 67-70:

VOLODYMYR TOOK THE throne in 980. He spent the first decade of his rule on warfare, ensuring that the realm created by his predecessor stayed together. Following in Sviatoslav’s footsteps, he again defeated the Khazars and the Volga Bulgars, reasserted his power over the Viatichians in the Oka basin, and pushed westward to the Carpathians, taking a number of fortresses from the Poles, including the town of Premyshl (Przemyśl) on today’s Polish-Ukrainian border. His main concern, however, was the southern frontier, where the Rus’ settlements were under continual attack by the Pechenegs and other nomadic tribes. Volodymyr strengthened border defenses by building fortifications along the local rivers, including the Sula and the Trubizh. He settled those areas with prisoners of war and subjects from other parts of the realm. Rus’, born of conquest, now sought stability by defending its borders instead of attacking the frontiers of other states.

Under Volodymyr’s rule, Kyiv’s relations with Byzantium were also changing. Whereas his predecessor on the Kyivan throne, Helgi, allegedly had sent troops against Byzantium to obtain trade preferences, and Sviatoslav did the same to acquire new territory in the Balkans, Volodymyr invaded the Crimea in the spring of 989 in pursuit of marriage, if not love. He besieged the Byzantine town of Chersonesus, demanding the hand of the sister of Emperor Basil II. A few years earlier, the emperor had asked Volodymyr for military assistance, promising the hand of his sister Anna in return. Volodymyr sent his troops to help up the emperor. But Basil was in no hurry to fulfill his promise. After receiving this slap in the face, Volodymyr refused to turn the other cheek and instead attacked the empire. His tactic worked. Alarmed by news of the fall of Chersonesus, Basil dispatched his sister Anna to the Crimea. She arrived with a retinue that included numerous Christian clerics.

Volodymyr’s request for marriage was granted in return for an assurance that the barbarian chieftain (as the ruler of Kyiv was regarded in Constantinople) would accept Christianity. Volodymyr went along. His baptism would start the process of the Christianization of Kyivan Rus’ and open a new chapter in the region’s history. Once the wedding party had moved back to Kyiv, Volodymyr removed the pantheon of pagan gods, including the most powerful of them—Perun, the god of thunder—from a hill above the Dnieper and put the Christian clergymen to work baptizing the population of Kyiv. The Christianization of Rus’ had begun—a long and difficult process that would take centuries to complete.

Our main source on the baptism of Rus’, the Kyivan chronicler, writes that Muslim Bulgars, Jewish Khazars, Christian Germans representing the pope, and a Greek scholar who spoke on behalf of Byzantine Christianity, the religion that Volodymyr chose, had all importuned Volodymyr. The story of the choice of faith as told in the Primary Chronicle is of course naïve in many ways. But it reflects certain real alternatives facing the Kyivan ruler, for he indeed did the picking and choosing. Volodymyr chose the religion of the strongest country in the region, in which the emperor was no less important an ecclesiastical figure—more important, in fact—than the patriarch. By choosing Christianity, he gained the prestige of marrying into an imperial family, which promptly elevated the status of his house and realm. Volodymyr’s choice of Christian name sheds additional light on his reasons for accepting Christianity. He took the same name as the emperor, Basil, indicating that in Byzantium he had found a political and religious model to emulate at home. A generation later, Kyivan intellectuals such as Metropolitan Ilarion would compare him and his baptism of Rus’ to Emperor Constantine and his role in establishing Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.

To be sure, the Byzantine political and ecclesiastical elite helped Volodymyr make the “right choice.” They were unhappy with the marriage but not with the conversion. The Byzantines had begun sending missionaries to the region soon after the Rus’ Vikings attacked Constantinople in 860. Back then, Patriarch Photius of Constantinople, the same clergyman who left us the description of the Viking attack, had sent one of his best students, Cyril of Thessalonica, to the Crimea and then to the Khazar kaganate. Along with his brother Methodius, Cyril devised the Glagolitic alphabet to transcribe Christian texts into the Slavic languages. The two men subsequently became known as the apostles to the Slavs and gained sainthood. Attempts to convert Kyivan rulers were undertaken long before Volodymyr’s conversion, as attested by the story of his grandmother, Olha, who became the first known Christian ruler and the first Christian woman in Kyiv named Helen. Apart from propagating Christianity, the Byzantine elites began to gain influence over the “barbaric” rulers and peoples, who had no fancy genealogies and little in the way of sophisticated culture but a great deal of destructive power.

After Volodymyr’s conversion, the patriarch of Constantinople created the Metropolitanate of Rus’, one of few ecclesiastical provinces named after its population and not the city where the bishop or metropolitan would reside. The patriarch reserved for himself the right to appoint metropolitans to head the Rus’ church—most of them would be Greeks. The metropolitan in turn controlled the appointment of bishops, most of whom would come from the ranks of the local elite. The first monasteries were established, using a Byzantine statute. Church Slavonic, the first literary language of Kyivan Rus’, initially functioned predominantly as a translation tool, making Greek texts understandable to local elites. Volodymyr issued regulations defining the rights and privileges of the clergy and gave one-tenth of his income to the church. Christianity in Kyivan Rus’ began at the top and moved slowly down the social ladder, spreading from center to periphery along rivers and trade routes. In some remote areas, especially northeastern Rus’, pagan priests resisted the new religion for centuries, and Kyivan missionaries who ventured there would end up dead as late as the twelfth century.

Volodymyr’s choice would have a profound impact on his realm and on the history of eastern Europe as a whole. Instead of continuing warfare with Byzantium, the new Rus’ polity was entering into an alliance with the only surviving part and continuator of the Roman Empire and thereby opening itself to the political and cultural influences of the Mediterranean world. It would prove fateful that Volodymyr not only brought Rus’ into the Christian world but also made it part of Eastern Christianity. Many of the consequences are as important today as they were at the turn of the second millennium.

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Filed under Greece, language, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Scandinavia, Ukraine

by Joel | 15 June 2026 · 12:49 am

Kyiv as Byzantium North

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 65-66:

FROM THE VERY first reports about the Rus’ princes on the Dnieper River, we hear of their attraction to the Byzantine Empire. The same thing that had attracted the Huns and Goths to Rome drew the Viking merchant warriors to the Byzantine capital, Constantinople: earthly riches, along with power and prestige. The Vikings never set out to topple Byzantium, but they tried to get as close to the empire and its capital as possible, launching a number of expeditions to capture Constantinople.

Sviatoslav’s death in 972 closed an important period in the history of Rus’ and its relations with its powerful southern neighbor. To the next two generations of Kyivan rulers, association with Constantinople was no less desirable than it had been for Sviatoslav. But Sviatoslav’s successors were concerned not only with money and commerce but also with the power, prestige, and high culture emanating from Byzantium. Instead of conquering Constantinople on the Bosphorus, as their predecessors had attempted to do, they decided to reproduce it on the Dnieper. This turn in Rus’ relations with the Byzantine Greeks and the new expectations of the Kyivan princes came to the fore during the rule of Sviatoslav’s son Volodymyr and the latter’s son Yaroslav. The two ran the Kyivan realm for more than half a century and are often credited with turning it into a true medieval state—one with a more or less clearly defined territory, system of government, and, last but not least, ideology. Much of the latter came from Byzantium.

As a prince of Kyiv, Sviatoslav’s son, Volodymyr, was less bellicose and ambitious than his father but turned out to be more successful in achieving his goals. Fifteen years old when his father died near the Dnieper rapids, Volodymyr had brothers who wanted the throne for themselves, and a new wave of Scandinavian arrivals eased his path to power. Before wresting the Kyivan throne from one of his brothers, Volodymyr spent more than five years as a refugee in Scandinavia, the ancestral homeland of his clan. He returned to Rus’ with a new Viking army. The Kyivan chronicler tells us that after Volodymyr took Kyiv, his soldiers asked for payment. Volodymyr promised to give them tribute from the local tribes but was unable to deliver. Instead, he recruited the Viking commanders as his local administrators in forts that he built on the steppe frontier, allowing the rest of the army to engage in an expedition against Byzantium. He also ordered his people not to let that army into their towns and to prevent them from returning.

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Filed under Greece, migration, military, nationalism, Scandinavia, Turkey, Ukraine

by Joel | 11 June 2026 · 12:09 am

Defining Ukraine and Ukrainian

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 24-27:

Nation is an important—although not dominant—category of analysis and element of the story that, along with the ever changing idea of Europe, defines the nature of this narrative. This book tells the history of Ukraine within the borders defined by the ethnographers and mapmakers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which often (but not always) coincided with the borders of the present-day Ukrainian state. It follows the development of the ideas and identities linking those lands together from the times of the medieval Kyivan state, known in historiography as Kyivan Rus’, to the rise of modern nationalism and explains the origins of the modern Ukrainian state and political nation. In doing so, the book focuses on Ukrainians as the largest demographic group and, in time, the main force behind the creation of the modern nation and state. It pays attention to Ukraine’s minorities, especially Poles, Jews, and Russians, and treats the modern multiethnic and multicultural Ukrainian nation as a work in progress. Ukrainian culture always existed in a space shared with other cultures and early on involved navigating among the “others.” The ability of Ukrainian society to cross inner and outer frontiers and negotiate identities created by them constitutes the main characteristic of the history of Ukraine as presented in this book.

Politics, international and domestic, provide a convenient storyline, but in writing this book, I found geography, ecology, and culture most lasting and thus most influential in the long run. Contemporary Ukraine, as seen from the perspective of longue durée cultural trends, is a product of the interaction of two moving frontiers, one demarcated by the line between the Eurasian steppes and the eastern European parklands, the other defined by the border between Eastern and Western Christianity. The first frontier was also the one between sedentary and nomadic populations and, eventually, between Christianity and Islam. The second goes back to the division of the Roman Empire between Rome and Constantinople and marks differences in political culture between Europe’s east and west that still exist today. The movement of these frontiers over the centuries gave rise to a unique set of cultural features that formed the foundations of present-day Ukrainian identity.

One cannot tell the history of Ukraine without telling the story of its regions. The cultural and social space created by the movement of frontiers has not been homogenous. As state and imperial borders moved across the territory defined by Ukrainian ethnic boundaries, they created distinct cultural spaces that served as foundations of Ukraine’s regions—the former Hungarian-ruled Transcarpathia, historically Austrian Galicia, Polish-held Podolia and Volhynia, the Cossack Left Bank of the Dnieper with the lower reaches of that river, Sloboda Ukraine, and finally the Black Sea coast and the Donets basin, colonized in imperial Russian times. Unlike most of my predecessors, I try to avoid treating the history of various regions (such as the Russian- and Austrian-ruled parts of Ukraine) in separate sections of the book but rather look at them together, providing a comparative perspective on their development within a given period.

In conclusion, a few words about terminology. The ancestors of modern Ukrainians lived in dozens of premodern and modern principalities, kingdoms, and empires, and in the course of time they took on various names and identities. The two key terms that they used to define their land were “Rus’” and “Ukraine.” (In the Cyrillic alphabet, Rus’ is spelled Pycь: the last character is a soft sign indicating palatalized pronunciation of the preceding consonant.) The term “Rus’,” brought to the region by the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries, was adopted by the inhabitants of Kyivan Rus’, who took the Viking princes and warriors into their fold and Slavicized them. The ancestors of today’s Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians adopted the name “Rus’” in forms that varied from the Scandinavian/Slavic “Rus’” to the Hellenized “Rossiia.” In the eighteenth century, Muscovy adopted the latter form as the official name of its state and empire.

The Ukrainians had different appellations depending on the period and region in which they lived: Rusyns in Poland, Ruthenians in the Habsburg Empire, and Little Russians in the Russian Empire. In the course of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian nation builders decided to end the confusion by renouncing the name “Rus’” and clearly distinguishing themselves from the rest of the East Slavic world, especially from the Russians, by adopting “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” to define their land and ethnic group, both in the Russian Empire and in Austria-Hungary. The name “Ukraine” had medieval origins and in the early modern era denoted the Cossack state in Dnieper Ukraine. In the collective mind of the nineteenth-century activists, the Cossacks, most of whom were of local origin, were the quintessential Ukrainians. To link the Rus’ past and the Ukrainian future, Mykhailo Hrushevsky called his ten-volume magnum opus History of Ukraine-Rus’. Indeed, anyone writing about the Ukrainian past today must use two or even more terms to define the ancestors of modern Ukrainians.

In this book, I use “Rus’” predominantly but not exclusively with reference to the medieval period. “Ruthenians” to denote Ukrainians of the early modern era, and “Ukrainians” when I write about modern times. Since the independent Ukrainian state’s creation in 1991, its citizens have all come to be known as “Ukrainians,” whatever their ethnic background. This usage reflects the current conventions of academic historiography, and although it makes for some complexity, I hope that it does not lead to confusion.

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Filed under Hungary, language, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion, Russia, Scandinavia, scholarship, Ukraine

by Joel | 6 June 2026 · 5:25 am

Ecology Speech Olympiad in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 104-105:

Each year every school in the country competed in contests of Language Arts, Science and Mathematics to determine Moldova’s top scholars. Teachers of winning pupils were also rewarded. The Russian School of Riscani, known regionally for subpar students, perennially lost to the rival Moldovan Lyceum up the hill. But this year the odds were in the Russians’ favor, as I—Mr. Aaron, the town’s foreign expert—would be the guest Olympiad judge.

Today’s contest was in ecology, a subject of which I knew nothing. Regardless, the presentations would be in English and I was therefore the authority. The entire event transpired over a hectic two-hour period.

We arrived at the Moldovan Lyceum, a castle with narrow windows that had once been the residence of the town’s founder. A legend stated the fortress had withstood an assault by raiding Turks. Once inside, I was introduced to the Moldovan half of the judging panel: a biology teacher from the Moldovan Lyceum and a Romanian language teacher from Mihaileni, one of the competing lyceums from a village within the district. Nadezhda and I were the other two panel members. The two Moldovan teachers knew Nadezhda and hated her. I did not know where this animosity came from, but I witnessed it in the side-whisper conversations and the politely sterile manner in which they greeted her by her full name, Nadezhda Ivanovna.

The competition began; presentations would precede a multiple-choice test.

The Moldovan team presented first, speaking about the need to use conservationist principles when building houses. I thought the presentation very fair. The two girls presenting were polite when they addressed the panel, spoke clearly, and despite repeating each sentence for effect, made some decent points about man’s impact on nature.

The Russian team went next, speaking about the need to clean apartments regularly unless one wanted to kill his family with the poisons that the human body produced every day and shed into the environment. I left the presentation unconvinced of the scientific rigor of the team’s investigations, but they’d presented with loud voices and had clearly convinced Nadezhda of their superior ecological intellect. She poked me in the ribs and nodded as though to say, winners.

The village team from Mihaileni went last, presenting about the need to protect well water. Their presentation was exceptionally well researched; however, I felt they’d relied too heavily on the bilingual dictionary. I audibly groaned when a young girl used the phrases “excrement cocktail” and “repeated, daily consumption” in the same sentence. Nadezhda—an English teacher herself—found no objection in that usage. And though I’d expected as much, I then knew for certain that the other Moldovan panelists did not speak English, and were merely grading these presentations on the volume and emotional conviction of the speakers.

The judging panel stepped outside during the multiple-choice test. The biology teacher from the Moldovan Lyceum tried to speak to me in Romanian so that Nadezhda wouldn’t understand the conversation. “He only speaks Russian,” said Nadezhda. “He speaks only modern languages.”

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Filed under education, language, Moldova, nationalism, Romania, Russia, U.S.

by Joel | 5 June 2026 · 3:36 am

Christmas in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 81-82:

Orthodox Christmas came in January. Dima and Katya lay prostrate on the unfolded divan, still wearing the Barcelona sweatshirts I’d given them three days before. Dariya wore her new sweatshirt also—red and yellow like Spain’s flag with the number 7 thrown across the back. She read quietly in the chair after Dima had complained the TV volume was too much to handle. Both Dima and Katya had worked twenty-hour days for the past week in preparation for the strains Christmas brought to the baking world; Christmas Day itself was for bakers to relax.

I woke and joined them in the living room, slipping into the chair next to Dariya. I wore the bright red Soviet propaganda t-shirt the family had given me: CCCP—Always Forward! Everyone wished me a Merry Christmas; I spit the Russian words back at them and all seemed pleased. And then, suddenly, everyone in the room (except me) discussed my religion; I wasn’t orthodox, they knew, so therefore a Baptist or a Catholic, like John F. Kennedy. I explained, as best I could, that my father’s family descended from Hungarian Jews and my mother’s from French Catholics. Dima and Katya repeated old stories of hard working Jews that had lived in Riscani years ago before emigrating to Israel; they talked of President John F. Kennedy, a man they seemed to associate with religion even more than the Pope.

“But can Aaron go with me?” asked Dariya.

“It should be fine,” said Dima. “Just don’t let him touch anything.”

“Go where?” I asked.

“Yes, don’t let him touch anything,” agreed Katya. “And take his hat off at the right time.”

“Go where?” I repeated.

“To Church,” said Dariya. “Go put on better clothes.”

* * *

What had changed in Riscani since the fall of the Soviet Union? A history text would mention the collapse of the farming collective, the breakdown of local government that led to widespread corruption, perhaps the cutting of the trade pathways that provided markets for the locally manufactured goods—cheese, wine and perfumes. In Moldova, I observed the effects of Soviet collapse every day, but only understood the fragments of disrupted life as they affected my new family. Dima spoke frequently over vodka shots of longer workdays and fewer vacations; a decade had passed since he’d relaxed by the sea in Odessa. Katya complained about the value of the family’s bread decreasing slowly every year; soon the people would expect bakers to give it away for free. And Dariya worried, with reason, that her education was far inferior to the quality of the common village schools her parents had passed through decades earlier.

But gloom did not permeate everything; the collapse had destroyed the compulsion to worship the state. Riscani now had a proper church—a gray, sloping, Orthodox Church—situated on the path leading to the bar on the lake. This church had been constructed before WWII. It had survived that conflict, only to be stripped of its icons, murals, priest, and renamed “The Museum of Atheism” during its time in the hands of the Soviet Union. Now the church had taken back its name.

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Filed under language, Moldova, nationalism, religion, U.S., USSR

by Joel | 4 June 2026 · 3:37 am

Reading Russian Authors in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 61-62:

On the night before I left for Spain, Dariya knocked and entered my room with her teaching notebook. She’d settled in comfortably as my language instructor. That night we continued our discussion of motion verbs: the differences between going one way to a destination or there and back; of general “wander-going” without destination; of moving between locations by foot or by motorized conveyance; of which word to use when any type of “hovering” was involved. Russian contained enough variations of the word “go” to fill the lessons of several days.

Dariya rummaged through the contents of my desk while she waited for me to conjugate the verb, “to go one way by ground conveyance.” She scanned several Peace Corps documents for passages she understood. Discouraged, she flipped over the novel I was reading. Her lips fluttered as she sounded out the letters of the title. Her eyes grew wide. She slapped at my shoulder to stop my writing and said, “I’ve read this!”

“What have you read?” screamed Dima from the living room. He entered quickly.

Dariya showed him the book. He nodded his head. “I approve of Pasternak.”

He took the chair from Dariya (she moved to the bed) and asked me what other Russian writers I knew. We listed names for the next few moments. Dima wanted to know which authors the typical American would know.

Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy.

“Of course,” said Dima. “The basis of modern intelli-gence.”

Pasternak. Gogol. Chekov.

“Brilliant men,” said Dima. “Poets.” Nabokov.

“I hear he is good,” said Dima.

Solzhenitsyn.

Dima shook his head. “No. We never read him.”

The family possessed a collection of antique books that they kept behind glass next to the fine china. But I’d never seen them read, even when the television was broken.

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Filed under education, language, literature, Moldova, nationalism, Russia

by Joel | 2 June 2026 · 12:15 am

Language Lessons in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 26-27:

Our language instructor gave us directions to a landmark in the center of town, and we soon realized the directions had been intentionally complicated so that we’d have to ask questions of locals. Away from headquarters, we passed a yellow, onion-top church and were then sucked into the central bazaar, an outdoor black hole of discount merchandise. Anyone dealing any type of transaction came at us with booming Slavic accents, as if their words need only enter our physical space to stun us and take control of our wallets. I considered buying cheese, batteries, soap packets, tin cups for drinking, but managed to pass through without losing money.

Vendors conversed with their friends in shouts from stall to stall. Flip-flops, light machinery, dried fish, bulk tea, clothing, duplicates of keys, endless buckets of salted cheese, olives, rice, cucumbers, tomatoes, liters of wine in reused soda bottles. These vendors were the types who’d ridden with me on the bus in the morning—old babushkas selling whatever they had too much of at home. Grandchildren ran wild in the corridors of the bazaar, dashing in between, behind, and under the vendor stalls with their rubber toy guns.

It seemed everyone in the capital spoke only Russian. Romanian might have been spoken at home among family members, but Russian was the language of money, spoken openly at shops and on the streets. And though I understood the majority of volunteers sent to Moldova would learn Romanian in order to serve the poorest communities, I didn’t envy them. Unlike other colleagues, Jesse and I would never complain about policemen and bazaar women refusing (or unable) to speak Romanian, checks from all restaurants presented in the Cyrillic alphabet, and host families only speaking an angry-sounding foreign language to them at home, expecting them to respond to the sharp sounds as though they were dogs.

The din of commerce activity decreased once we left the maze of the bazaar. We hadn’t yet asked directions, still waiting for someone who appeared within our age range to approach. A girl walked fast and picked up speed as we addressed her, perhaps to shorten our opportunity to harass her. But she stopped shortly after passing us, having responded to the softness and insecurity in our accents. She pointed toward a busy intersection a block away and seemed disappointed that we ended our conversation by wishing her health and happiness. I think she wanted to tell us her name. At the intersection a woman selling popcorn perked up when she heard our accents and pointed across the street to a sidewalk art sale. At the art bazaar a man selling Russian stacking dolls said we were on the right track and asked where we were from, and recommended dolls to match any personality. He thought our accents sounded Polish. A block farther we stopped another girl and she pointed across the street to our destination.

McDonald’s.

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by Joel | 30 May 2026 · 1:26 am

Legacies of the Jeannette Expedition

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 406-410:

IN 1883, George De Long’s remains, along with those of his comrades, were removed from Amerika Khaya [in Russia] and brought to the United States in a long and elaborate mass funeral procession jointly orchestrated by the U.S. Navy and the Russian government. The secretary of the Navy called De Long and his men “martyrs in the cause of science.” After a Manhattan funeral attended by thousands of mourners, De Long was buried, along with five of his fellow explorers, in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx; that same year, his journals from the voyage, edited by Emma De Long, were published to wide acclaim. Although the Jeannette expedition became the subject of a naval court of inquiry and a congressional hearing that produced considerable controversy, both tribunals upheld De Long’s command and reputation. In 1884, New York City dedicated a prime piece of land along the East River as Jeannette Park (it’s now known as Vietnam Veterans Plaza). Six years later, a replica of Melville’s Lena monument and cross was erected on the grounds of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, overlooking the Severn River. A mountain range in northwestern Alaska was named in De Long’s honor, as were two naval ships. In Russia, the High Arctic islands he discovered—Jeannette, Henrietta, and Bennett—are known as Ostrova De Long.

FOR MORE THAN a century after his death, August Petermann’s work continued to be a prominent force in cartography. In 2004, after nearly 150 years of publication, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen halted its presses in Gotha and closed its doors forever. The geographer’s legacy lives on in dozens of place-names scattered about the planet, including the Petermann Ranges of Australia; Petermann Island, off the coast of Antarctica; and the Petermann Glacier of Greenland, one of the world’s largest. His name has even been immortalized in space: A feature in the north polar region of the moon is known by astronomers as Petermann Crater. Today, Petermann’s rare maps often fetch thousands of dollars at auction and are coveted by fine-art collectors around the world.

…

GEORGE MELVILLE NEVER quite got the north country out of his system. In 1884, he returned to the Arctic to search for survivors of yet another disastrous American polar effort—the Greely Expedition—and remained a tireless champion of America’s push for the North Pole. Melville divorced Hetty and remarried, spending most of his life in Washington. He rose within the ranks to become engineer in chief of the U.S. Navy and, eventually, a rear admiral. Melville presided over an expansive redesign of the fleet, largely completing its conversion from wood to metal, and from wind to steam power. When he retired, in 1903, the U.S. Navy boasted one of the most powerful modernized fleets in the world. Widely sought on the lecture circuit, Melville wrote a popular book on the Jeannette expedition, In the Lena Delta, and defended De Long to the end. Melville died in Philadelphia in 1912. Two Navy ships—a destroyer tender and an oceanographic research vessel—were named after him. Today, the George W. Melville Award is the Navy’s highest honor for accomplishments in nautical engineering.

AFTER RECOVERING FROM his Jeannette ordeal, John Danenhower also enjoyed popularity on the lecture circuit and became a well-known critic of both the De Long expedition and Arctic exploration in general. “It is time to call a halt,” Danenhower argued, “to further exploration of the central polar basin. There are better directions for the display of true manhood and heroism.” Danenhower married and fathered two children, and for several years, he served successfully, and seemingly happily, as an officer in the U.S. Navy. But in 1887, his melancholy returned. Alone in his quarters in Annapolis, Danenhower shot himself in the head with a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.

JOHN MUIR NEVER returned to the High Arctic. After his trip on the Corwin, he became gradually embroiled in the conservation battles that led to his co-founding, in 1892, of the Sierra Club. Instrumental in the creation of Yosemite National Park, Muir is considered one of the fathers of the environmental movement. He died in 1914. The Cruise of the Corwin, Muir’s posthumously published account of his journey in search of the lost Jeannette, is now a classic of Arctic literature.

AFTER WINNING MEDALS and Navy commendations, Charles Tong Sing turned to a life of gambling and crime, resulting in several prison terms. As the head a powerful Chinese criminal syndicate in New York, he was said to be responsible for at least six murders; he became known as Scarface Charley, in reference to a five-inch facial scar from an injury he sustained aboard the Jeannette. An 1883 article in the New York Times noted, “Recently he gained an unenviable notoriety in Chinatown through his ferocity and physical prowess, and has been suspected of a number of bold and very adroit robberies.” Later in life, Charley Tong Sing went clean and reportedly ran a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, worked as a court interpreter, and briefly served as a policeman in Portland, Oregon. The circumstances of his death are unknown.

WILLIAM NINDEMANN WAS awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He married Miss Newman in New York, as planned, but was soon widowed and left to raise their only son, Billy. Nindemann spent two decades working closely with the Irish-American engineer John Holland, widely regarded as the father of the modern submarine. Serving as a gunner and torpedo operator on Holland’s prototypes, Nindemann delivered several of the new undersea vessels to Japan for use in the Russo-Japanese War. In 1913, one year to the day after his son, Billy, drowned in a canoe accident on the Hudson River, Nindemann died in Brooklyn.

…

THE LAST SURVIVING member of the Jeannette expedition was Herbert Leach, the seaman from Melville’s party who nearly perished of frostbite in the Lena delta. A native of Penobscot, Maine, Leach worked much of his life in a shoe factory in Massachusetts. In 1928, he joined Emma De Long at the unveiling of an enormous granite statue dedicated to George De Long and the other Jeannette dead, at Woodlawn Cemetery. Leach died in 1933.

…

IN 1938, Emma De Long, well into her eighties, published her memoir, Explorer’s Wife. (That same year had seen something of a Jeannette revival, with the publication of a best-selling novel, Hell On Ice, which was adapted into a nationally broadcast radio drama by Orson Welles.) Emma De Long never remarried, and she lived out her last years alone—happily, she said—on a New Jersey farm she had purchased. “My husband’s memory,” she said, “is all I have left.” Not only was she a widow, but she had lost her only child: Sylvie De Long, after serving in World War I as a Red Cross nurse, marrying, and giving birth to two children, had died in 1925, of a mastoid infection. Emma De Long passed away in 1940 at the age of ninety-one. She was laid to rest beside her husband at Woodlawn Cemetery.