Category Archives: religion

by | 13 March 2023 · 5:01 am

The Ramshackle Habsburg Empire

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 225-227:

Like the Hohenzollerns of Prussia, the Habsburgs had a variety of rights and powers in many different lands. They were Archdukes of Austria, hereditary Kings of Bohemia, traditional candidates to the elective throne of Hungary (though the Turks occupied much of it and Transylvania was an autonomous principality); and, besides holding a plethora of other titles, were Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire (again as hereditary candidates), a position which gave them little direct power, but a great deal of prestige and not a little patronage. The Habsburgs, then, governed in various ways at once – sometimes exerting direct authority backed up by force; more often abiding by precedents, negotiating, persuading, exerting influence through their powers to grant titles and make appointments.

Theirs was a ramshackle empire, which had expended much of its wealth and sustained much damage during the Thirty Years’ War; and it was still threatened by powerful enemies, notably Ottoman Turkey and France. Furthermore, although the Habsburgs had been the chief protagonist of the Catholic cause in the war, and although the peace sanctioned their imposing it on all their subjects, it was not practicable to do so in Hungary, where there were many Protestants; and the suppression of Protestantism elsewhere, as in Bohemia, tended to promote sullen resentment which might be exploited in the cause of rebellion. How, then, were these obstacles to Habsburg authority to be overcome? What glue could be found to bind these disparate peoples and territories into a cohesive body politic?

According to a leading authority the recipe called for the mutual support of the dynasty, the Counter-Reformation Church and a cosmopolitanized aristocracy, who formed a community of interest; and the use of religious mysteries, the mystique of kingship and the magic of the arts to hold people in thrall. But the military was also important.

The Habsburgs emerged from the war with a permanent standing army and thereafter strove to enlarge it, though as late as 1683 the establishment was only 36,000. Since this was a professional, disciplined, force which did not normally live off the land, it did not arouse the resentment of the population in the localities where it was stationed, as had formerly been the case. Indeed, in time, the army came to promote loyalty to the dynasty not only among those who served in it (the new permanent armies presented welcome new career opportunities to gentlemen and commoners alike), but among a wider public. The sight of neat ranks of men in attractive uniforms marching by to the invigorating sound of flutes and drums tended to arouse popular enthusiasm, and when the army won victories the dynasty gained prestige.

Nonetheless, as in Russia, the practice of religion and the institution of the Church were recognized as being of prime importance in legitimating the dynasty and promoting deference among its subjects. Both Ferdinand III and his successor Leopold I (1657–1705) were personally devout and, like Alexis of Russia, made public show of it. Leopold often made pilgrimages, visited monasteries three or four times a week and dispensed a great deal of charity to the needy. He also believed oaths, including those he himself swore, to be binding. Yet, like Alexis, insofar as he showed himself to be as pious as any prelate, he felt entitled to interfere in church affairs. Not only did he control the more important ecclesiastical appointments, order special prayers to be said and proclaim religious holidays by decree, he imposed taxes on the clergy and milked the church of funds, plate and valuables as the need arose. One can therefore understand the wry comment of the papal nuncio who wished the Emperor were not quite so pious.

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Filed under Austria, Eastern Europe, military, nationalism, religion, Russia

by | 10 March 2023 · 9:08 am

Rough Road to Greek Nationhood

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 206-208:

It was difficult for Bulgarians to think in terms of liberation other than through the church, which was dominated by Greeks, so that Bulgarian national feeling emerged almost as much in reaction to the Greeks as to the Turks.

The Greeks themselves present a different case, for they included important mercantile and administrative classes. These elements formed a cultural community of sorts, but they were distanced from the common people, who had also built up a tradition of self-defence, especially in the mountain areas and some of the islands. The Greek elite was also widely dispersed geographically. Their trading network ramified throughout the Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Black Sea littoral, while the Phanariotes staffed much of the Ottoman diplomatic service and bureaucratic machine besides ruling the Romanian principalities (often corruptly, but sometimes in the spirit of enlightened despotism). The Greek elite constituted fertile ground both for conspiracy and manipulation by foreign powers.

The Greek diaspora extended to Paris, and beyond; and French agents had been active in the Greek world since the later 1790s. Revolutionary notions were to grip members of the merchant class (though not the more substantial of them), some Orthodox clergy (though few bishops), and even an occasional potentate in the Ottoman service. But it was on Russian, not French soil, that the Greek revolution got off the ground. In 1814 expatriate Greeks formed a friendly society (Philiki Etairia) in Odessa. Like others founded earlier in Paris and Vienna its aims were cultural; unlike them, however, it aimed to liberate ‘the motherland’.

In 1821 it mounted an attempt to do so, launching an invasion of the Danubian Principalities. But Vladimirescu’s followers provided none of the support they had hoped for, and the Turks soon mopped them up. The conspirators succeeded, however, in sparking an insurgency in the Peleponnese and some of the islands. Though the Russians withdrew their ambassador from Istanbul, and Metternich opined (quite rightly as it happened) that Greece was merely a geographical expression, the Powers supported neither side. Then the Turks executed the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, even though he had roundly denounced the rebellion – and the idealists of Europe rallied to the cause of Greek independence. The volunteers (including Byron), the money, and, not least the publicity which they supplied contributed greatly to the success of the cause. Albeit indirectly, they also helped to ensure that the emergent state of Greece would adopt a Western-type constitution highly unsuitable for a society that was largely traditional and innocent of Western values. Events were to demonstrate that although the seeds of Western democratic ideas were to germinate in Eastern Europe, unlike the rampant bean-stalk of nationalism, the plants that grew out of them would be weak and spindly.

Greece’s first head of state, Capodistrias, understood the problem. He was an authoritarian in the mould of the enlightened despots. He set out to build sound administrative and educational systems, to improve communications and the economy. He also favoured land reform. Anticipating Stolypin, he regarded a free and prosperous peasantry as the foundation of a stable society. Traditional interest groups, whom he held in contempt, and idealists starry-eyed with Western ways, all hated him. In 1831 he was assassinated. When the ensuing anarchy finally subsided, independent Greece found herself (thanks to an agreement between Russia, France, and Britain) with a sizeable Western loan, a Bavarian King [Otto] and a small Bavarian army.

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Filed under Britain, Bulgaria, economics, France, Greece, language, nationalism, religion, Russia, Turkey, war

by | 9 March 2023 · 8:14 am

Literacy and the Rise of Nationalism

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 196-198:

Czechs benefiting from new educational opportunities learned German … and were thus able to devour the classics of German Romanticism. The University of Buda Press, founded in 1777, not only printed the first good Hungarian grammars but soon began to publish in Serbian, Slovak and Romanian. A grammar was vital to the definition of a single, literary language on which a sense of linguistic nationhood could be based (a collection of contrasting dialects could form no such basis). Furthermore, publication in a variety of emerging literary languages was to help spread a consciousness of a linguistic identity.

The march of the French armies into Eastern Europe also stimulated a rise of national consciousness. Napoleon’s creation of a province of ‘Illyria’ and a Duchy of Warsaw encouraged more people to think in terms of some sort of national independence, though he disappointed the hopes of his Polish followers. Moreover his conquests stimulated patriotic reactions which, in Prussia, began to develop into a German national feeling. The repeated defeats and humiliations suffered by Francis (who not only lost territories, but his ancient title of Holy Roman Emperor, and had to marry one of his daughters to the Corsican upstart) damaged the aura of unassailable majesty that had been carefully created around the House of Habsburg in the seventeenth century. No doubt this encouraged the idea that an alternative republican, and perhaps national, form of state might be feasible. However, the Hungarians spurned Napoleon’s invitation to rebel.

It should be stressed, however, that this stage of budding nationalism also drew on older concepts of group identification. Both Poles and Hungarians were to take pride in the traditions of the ‘noble nation’ (though not the Czechs whose nobility had been effectively Germanized). Recognising the sense of identity (and superiority) that genealogy can give, enthusiasts set out to provide their nationalities with atavistic pedigrees, preferably ones that stretched back to ancient times. Attempts were also made to extend traditional loyalties to village and locality to all the territory inhabited by ‘the folk’; and priests played an important role in the rise of Balkan and especially Polish nationalism. Indeed, in the Polish case, exiled poets were to develop the mystical notions that Poles were God’s chosen people, that Poland was the Christ among nations, the crucified Messiah who would be resurrected; the saviour of mankind.

The nation-makers included philologists, historians and archaeologists as well as poets – for the people had to be persuaded to use a standard language that was, as far as possible, free from ‘foreign’ influences; and taught about the nation’s heroic past. In most cases both the sense of the nation and loyalty to it had to be created. This proved to be a slow process. For decades to come Bohemian villagers were to speak Czech and German dialects which were sometimes unintelligible to sophisticates from Prague who spoke proper Czech and Hochdeutsch. The first volume of the anti-German Palacky’s history was published in German, not Czech; and when Hungarian enthusiasts eventually translated the Marseillaise they rendered it not into Magyar, but into the official language of the Hungarian Diet, Latin.

Literacy, then, was a key factor in the rise of nationalism, and in particular the literacy of the ‘middle class’ of poorer nobles (the magnates still tended to be cosmopolitan), junior civil servants, officers, seminarists and poorer clergy. Jacobinism had attracted elements of the same groups. Indeed Ferenc Kazinczy, one of Martinovics’s co-conspirators, was to assume a pioneering role in the creation of a Hungarian literary language once he was released from gaol. The size of this nascent intelligentsia continued to increase, for the Emperor Francis, determined though he was to keep revolutionary forces at bay, continued to promote education. Following in the tradition of Enlightened Despotism, he extended the educational system and even encouraged teaching in local vernaculars in order to spread ‘useful knowledge’. However, the emphasis was placed firmly on technical subjects. The dissemination of ideas was severely discouraged.

As matters turned out, the policy contained two unforeseen weaknesses. At the elementary level the poorly-paid teachers constituted the sort of intellectual proletariat that was susceptible to radical ideas. Schoolteachers were to be major carriers of the nationalist virus throughout Eastern Europe. The second weakness concerned the exclusion of philosophy in favour of theology (a policy that was to be followed by Soviet regimes, too, of course). This created a hunger for forbidden fruits in people who lacked the capacity to digest them properly.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, education, language, nationalism, philosophy, religion

by | 3 March 2023 · 5:42 am

Fate of 1968ers in Greece and Poland

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 39-40:

Student unrest, first marked in Italy in 1966, began to spread throughout Europe, including some countries in the Bloc, while in Greece a junta of colonels staged a coup d’etat against everything the students stood for and in support of traditional values. It was ironic that Greece, despite massive injections of American aid and sizeable income from Greeks working abroad, had failed to match even neighbouring Bulgaria’s increase in living standards since the war. What happened in Greece raised the question of how many Soviet Bloc countries, with their still largely traditional cultures, might have resorted to military government in the postwar era had they not been taken into the Soviet orbit. More immediately, however, it raised the question of how their governments would react to the imported Western phenomenon of student protest.

In Poland, one of the two countries most affected, there was a reaction analogous to that of the Colonels. Early in 1968 the production of a play by the nineteenth-century romantic, Mickiewicz (see Chapter 5), was banned because it included some anti-Russian remarks. This provoked fierce student calls for greater freedom and ‘national autonomy’. The students’ zeal found an echo among many intellectuals, not least among economists who had been pressing for reform. There was no echo, however, among the working classes. Nonetheless the Interior Minister, Mieczyslaw Moczar, reacted strongly.

Like the Colonels in Greece, Moczar was cast in the old, heroic mould, and he was motivated by two traditional values in particular: nationalism and antisemitism. By extension he also disliked intellectuals and economists who were threatening the position of so many loyal, bureaucratic place-men. Moczar saw a chance of defusing tension by exploiting long-standing popular prejudices. Accordingly he arranged for students to be beaten up and for many of them to be arrested. He set up a commission to ‘supervise’ the handful of Jews remaining in Poland after the Holocaust, and to coordinate antisemitic propaganda. But the experiment was short-lived. In December 1968 the commission was abolished and Moczar disappeared from the stage.

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by | 2 March 2023 · 5:27 am

Eastern Europe, 1990s: Disappointment

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 9-10:

The rejoicing was widespread, and particularly intense among the young as well as those who had run foul of the pervasive officialdom and the secret police. Yet the euphoria did not last long. The sudden removal of controls and taboos encouraged entrepreneurs and foreign investors, but also crooks and asset-strippers. Attempts at systemic change and reorientation of trade resulted in economic dislocations and both industrial and consumer shortages. Production plummeted; so did real incomes. Inflation rose and hoarding made things worse. As rules and procedures associated with the old order were increasingly ignored, and as uncertainty about the law, the value of things and, not least, the validity of legal titles increased, so did a degree of chaos. At the same time crime rates soared.

Measures to control inflation and reduce subsidies and over-manning produced rising prices and unemployment, industrial discontent and rising pessimism. There had been hopeful talk of another Marshall Plan, but President Bush held out an empty wallet. The world, after all, was in the throes of one of those periodic economic turns which Communists used to refer to scornfully as ‘crises of capitalism’. Help did come but chiefly in the form of loans with harsh conditions attached. The millions who had innocently assumed that revolution would bring them instant betterment were disappointed.

There were unexpected political, as well as economic, consequences. To the ill-disguised dismay of many countries East and West, the two Germanies rushed to reunification. In Poland the ‘Solidarity’ movement soon split asunder; an unknown emigre attracted more votes than the conscientious Premier Mazowiecki in the presidential elections won by Lech Walesa; and Polish cities were disfigured by anti-semitic graffiti. In Romania, as in Bulgaria, reformed Communists were victorious in what were substantially free elections, yet the opposition ‘Democrats’ refused to accept the electorate’s decision. In Hungary parliament became the scene of endless bickering between a multitude of different parties; in Czechoslovakia bitter resentment soon surfaced between Czechs and Slovaks; and at the time of writing (March 1991) unbridled nationalism and strident populism were threatening the break-up of Yugoslavia and the collapse of the USSR itself.

As a new order emerges from the turmoil some features that had previously characterized the region have begun to disappear. But what were these countries like before the changes? What was the stable state before the state of flux?

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by | 11 January 2023 · 3:47 am

Lakotas Arrive in the Black Hills, 1830s

From Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen (The Lamar Series in Western History; Yale U. Press, 2019), Kindle pp. 167-169:

Oglalas and Sicangus were the first to turn west, ascending the White and Bad [rivers] which offered reliable water and wood, serving as superb passageways. As they inched upriver, they clashed with Kiowas and Crows, pushing the former to the south and the latter to the west. Sicangus joined forces with Cheyennes against the Kiowas, while Oglalas spearheaded campaigns against Crows under the leadership of Bull Bear whose boldness and resolve seemed to have given their operations particular sharpness. By the late 1820s Crows had retreated from the Black Hills into the Powder River country a hundred miles to the west, and Oglalas and Sicangus established themselves on Pahá Sápa’s eastern side. By that time Sans Arcs, Minneconjous, Two Kettles, Sihasapas, and Hunkpapas had also begun to shift west, establishing the Cheyenne and Grand [rivers] as entryways.

Lakotas had turned west, decisively, but they remained people of river valleys first and people of the plains second. They ventured into the western grasslands and Pahá Sápa from multiple points along timbered river valleys and moved back regularly along those same valleys to the Mníšoše [Missouri R.], which remained vital to their cosmology and economy. Essentially protrusions of the Missourian riparian woodlands, the White, Bad, Cheyenne, and other tributaries provided Lakotas with safe and familiar pathways into the West. When they began pulling away from the Missouri, they were not so much casting themselves loose on the open plains but extending their old riverland world into the West.

This tripartite pattern—a trunk line in the east, an elevated, magnet-like anchor in the west, and a row of arterials in between—formed the core of the Lakota world from the 1830s onward. It was in those three places where Lakotas spent most of their time—cooking, eating, sleeping, socializing, smoking, praying, raising children, tending horses, preparing hides, making clothes, tools, and weapons—and where most of them entered and left this world. This was the homeland Lakotas would defend against invaders and, when needed, expand.

The western tributaries were keys to land and wealth and power, but they were also conduits into a perilous new world, for they carried Lakotas toward greater aridity. The western Great Plains lie in a long rain shadow cast by the Rocky Mountains. Pacific winds pump moist maritime air eastward, but the air sheds much of its moisture while climbing up the Rockies. The shadow effect is strongest in the west, the 98th meridian marking a default line where evaporation exceeds precipitation and the soil starts to go dry. The grass cover reflects this, becoming shorter toward the west. Around the 105th meridian densely tufted blue grama and buffalo grasses become dominant and the plant canopy shrinks down to a few inches. The bison had adapted over the millennia to these semi-arid conditions, thriving on the stunted short-grasses that retained protein in their dry stalks, making them ideal winter forage. Tens of millions of them lived in the plains, their huge bodies a hunter’s delight.

That was when the Black Hills began to loom large in a material sense. When severe droughts struck the grasslands, the bison tended to seek relief in the high-altitude microclimate around the Black Hills where summers were cooler, rainfall higher, and pasture more lavish. Lakotas did the same. This introduced a new dimension to Pahá Sápa’s allure: it became a sanctuary and a meat pack. Lakotas gathered there to sit out droughts and subsist on buffaloes that seemed to give themselves up—just like the White Buffalo Calf Woman had promised. The control of Pahá Sápa became a spiritual and material imperative without which nothing in the world was secure—not its unearthly bounties, not the hunt, not the survival of Lakotas as a people. Hand paintings on Pahá Sápa’s rocky planes—red spots marking slain enemies—bespeak of the violent struggle that turned the mountain range into an exclusive domain of Lakotas and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies. By the late 1820s Lakotas were wintering in Pahá Sápa. The Black Hills belonged to them.

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by | 22 December 2022 · 6:29 am

A Hermit Old Believer in the Taiga

From A Journey into Russia, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2015), Kindle Loc. 4274ff:

When I think back on Agafya today, I hear her voice before I see her face. She speaks, but I do not hear any words, only an unmistakable melody. She seems to be singing. It sounds like a faint, unfinished song not intended for an audience.

For five days and four nights I heard her singing voice almost constantly. Each of its melodic variations impressed itself on me, even if I did not always understand the text. Sometimes I was not sure whether Agafya herself knew the text exactly. When she spoke, it often sounded as if her song drifted aimlessly and at random through fragments of memory and verses of scripture, through family tales and the life stories of people she had known.

…

While we walked along the river, the evening sun sank behind the mountains. The valley turned red before it paled. I was in a strange mental state, dead tired and wide awake at the same time, exhausted from the hike, electrified by our arrival. I could hardly feel the weight of my backpack anymore, everything seemed strangely light, as if the world in which I had landed was not quite real. Agafya walked in front of me, so close that I could make out the irregular seams in her dress, the dirt under her fingernails, the notches in her hatchet. I memorised every detail with the nervousness of a dreamer who knows that he may wake up at any moment.

I was only half listening when Lyonya told me the name of a smaller tributary which flowed into the Abakan just behind the fish trap: the Yerinat. We continued walking on its shore, until the dense forest suddenly opened up. A clearing wound its way up the mountainside. Three small wooden houses stood about halfway up. Above them I could make out the furrows of a potato field.

The oldest of the three huts was half-dilapidated. Agafya had lived in it until her father had died. The two other houses, which were visibly newer, had been built by Lyonya and his forestry colleagues. Agafya lived in the one on the left. Lyonya disappeared into the right one to unload our backpacks.

I unpacked the gifts I had brought along with me [from Abaza, Republic of Khakassia] the headscarf from Doctor Nazarov, the letter from Agafya’s cousins in Kilinsk, the jar with the home-pressed sunflower oil, a woollen blanket that I had bought as a gift and finally the letter from Galina, the linguist. Smiling, Agafya turned all the objects over in her hands, as if she was pondering their religious adequacy. In the end she put the headscarf, the blanket and the sunflower oil on a woodpile in front of her hut. Only the letters remained in her hands as she went inside.

A campfire was smouldering between the houses, with a pan full of fish roasting over the embers. While I was wondering who had put them on the fire, a very small man with a very long beard suddenly stood before me. He reached out his hand. ‘Alexei.’ The high voice did not fit his beard.

Alexei was a distant relative of Agafya’s. He visited her each year around this time. Usually he would stay a few weeks to help her with the winter preparations. He came from one of the Old Believer communities in the Altai Mountains. As it turned out, it was a neighbouring village of Kilinsk, the place where I had met Agafya’s cousins.

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by | 20 December 2022 · 7:11 am

“Fundamentals of Safe Living” in Siberia

From A Journey into Russia, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2015), Kindle Loc. 3404ff:

San Sanych was a teacher. At Abaza’s only school he taught a subject with the curious name ‘Fundamentals of Safe Living’. He instructed Russian students how to protect themselves against Russian threats: alcohol poisoning, terrorist attacks, sexually transmitted diseases, nuclear accidents, savage animals. To supplement his teacher’s salary, he leased the top floor of his house to tourists who came to Abaza for fishing or hunting. Occasionally he organised boat tours, mountain hikes and Taiga expeditions.

San Sanych’s actual name was Alexander Alexandrovich, but like many Alexander Alexandroviches, he used a shortened form of his first name and patronymic. San Sanych’s father had also been called San Sanych, just like his grandfather. Unfortunately, the family memory did not extend any further back, because the grandfather had died early – he had tried to save a church from being destroyed by the Bolsheviks, which the Bolsheviks had very much resented. The grandfather’s widowed wife, who had to make ends meet with an orphaned son, decided in her plight to become an agitator for atheism. Until the end of her life she taught students and collective farm workers that the god her husband had died for did not exist.

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by | 18 December 2022 · 2:46 am

Growth of Trans-Siberian Travel

From A Journey into Russia, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2015), Kindle Loc. 2435ff:

The glamorous luxury cars which Parisian society strolled through at the [World Exhibition of 1900] were never used in Trans-Siberian reality. Far simpler models commuted between Moscow and Vladivostok when the line was completed in 1904. The first symbolic cut of the spade had been performed 13 years earlier on the pacific coast by a young boy named Nicholas, who did not realise that he was digging his own grave – three decades later Tsar Nicholas II rolled to Yekaterinburg in a Trans-Siberian carriage, towards his execution.

Before the line was put into operation, Siberia was linked with the Russian west only by a rough, unpaved dirt road which was barely accessible for the major part of the year – in the winter snow hampered the journey; in the spring, mud; in the summer, dust. The relationship between the two parts of the country was loose, geographically and mentally. Even in the travel notes of Chekhov, who crossed the Eurasian landmass in a horse-drawn wagon shortly before the construction of the railway line, the inhabitants of Siberia spoke of Russia as if it were another, distant country. The endless trip over the Siberian tract must have made it feel like such.

Despite all the hardships, however, the road was hopelessly congested, even during Chekhov’s time. Year after year, since serfdom had been abolished in 1861, a stream of land-seeking farmers flowed into the vast expanses of Siberia. On horse-drawn carts people transported their entire belongings eastward, for 1,000s of kilometres. It happened that at their final destination they bumped into former neighbours, who had fled from serfdom years before to seek their fortunes in Siberia. For centuries the sparsely populated areas east of the Ural Mountains had attracted people who wanted to evade the state’s reach. Runaway serfs hid in Siberia, wanted criminals, escaped convicts, deflowered girls, dishonoured men, illegitimate children. The Old Believers were the most famous, but not the only community of sectarians who awaited the apocalypse deep in the wilderness. They shared their exile with all those outlaws, exiles and madmen who the state itself transported east so they would not cause any more damage in the Russian heartland.

Just a little earlier, there had not even been a road to Siberia. When the first bands of Cossacks crossed the Urals in the 16th century, they dragged dismantled rowing boats over the mountains. Siberia was conquered by water. The Cossacks used the branched river system that traverses the entire land mass between Moscow and the Pacific. From the Volga they worked their way forward to the Kama, from the Irtysh to the Ob, from the Yenisey to the Angara, from the Lena to the Amur. Piece by piece they wrested the country from the Tatar tribes who had dominated it since the collapse of the Mongol empire. The Tatars called their realm Sibir: ‘sleeping country’. The Cossacks, who adopted the Turkish word, woke Siberia with violence. When they reached the Pacific in 1639, not even 60 years after the beginning of the campaign, they had moved Russia’s border more than 5,000 kilometres to the east. Each year they had annexed an area the size of Great Britain to the already huge tsarist empire.

Siberia’s proportions are somewhat terrifying.

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by | 15 December 2022 · 4:13 am

Reactions to Moscow Subway Bombing

From A Journey into Russia, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2015), Kindle Loc. 1330ff:

When I woke up the next morning, I began to write down the experiences of the previous day. I stayed in the apartment the entire day. In the evening Vanya came home.

‘Damn traffic jams,’ he cursed. ‘I sat in the taxi for three hours.’

‘Why didn’t you take the subway?’

Surprised, he looked at me. ‘You don’t know?’

‘What don’t I know?’

‘A terrorist attack. Two bombs, this morning, in the underground; 36 people have died.’

Without knowing exactly why, I set out for the city centre. In the meantime, the subway had started running again, but the cars were as good as empty. The few passengers exchanged nervous glances. Shortly before the train reached the Ring Line, a dark-skinned woman boarded, apparently from the Caucasus. Two Russians, a man and a woman, left the car immediately.

At the station Park Kultury, where one of the two bombs had exploded, a silent crowd had gathered. All traces of the attack had been eliminated; there was nothing to see. The people were staring at a shrine of flowers and other offerings which had accrued spontaneously in the middle of the platform. No one spoke. Only a bearded man with an opened liturgical book in his hands whispered a requiem. Like all the others I stared silently at the shrine, where new offerings continued to be added. A pot of crocuses. A ten rouble note. Two icons of the Virgin Mother, one made of cardboard, the other of wood. Eighteen white tea lights, nine yellow icon candles, three red grave lanterns. A lighter, a box of matches, six chocolate eggs, two Snickers bars. A handwritten note: Vy zhivy – ‘You are alive’. Roses, carnations, asters, tulips, gerbera, pussy willows, fir sprigs.

Just as I was getting ready to go, a man walked up to the shrine. He was the type of man I characterise in my personal Moscow typology as a perestroika rocker: not young anymore, long hair, black leather jacket, very oppositional facial expression. He took two bottles of vodka and a stack of plastic cups out of his army backpack, placed them down with the other offerings to the dead, turned around and left. Mechanically, I counted the cups: 36, one for each.

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