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Heresson
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of frogs
Jun 2000
time: 06:29
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quote:
Originally posted by The Vagabond
I am afraid your fellow East European Saras won't agree with you in what Vilnius is concerned.  After all, we the evil Russkies returned Vilnius to Lithuania, thus restoring historic justice. They should be eternally thankful to us for that.
Ukrainians may not agree with you about Lvov either. After all, we returned Lvov to Ukraine. 
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They are partners in your crime!!!
Seriously, Vilnius and Lvov were majorly Polish, with 5% Lithuanian minority in Vilnius and 15% of Ukrainians in Lvov... And historical rights were not obvious.
It's not a matter of justice is these cities belonged to Poland or anyone else.
quote:
I am glad to see you don't hate us as such. You only hate what we are.
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I only hate Serb's claims.
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Do you see Russia trying to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO as imperialism?
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Of course.
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Under communism, perhaps. But now I see no problem. This can hardly damage our relations, which are at their lowest point ever anyway. In any case, it was just a big event in our history, worthy of a national holiday. It is not intended to damage relations with anyone.
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Ah, I don't really mind. After all, we have fight with Swedes in our national anthem, and still they are the most popular of our neighbours.
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Your interpretation of those events doesn't agree with ours. You are just whitewashing your nasty deeds and intentions.
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I do not. I know Russia suffered some because of lisowczycy f.e. back then. But it's true that no-one wanted to actually conquer Russia. Look, our feudals were just trying to put their people on your throne.
Is it that bad?
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:29
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quote:
Originally posted by Heresson
You've already done that. |
I tried to do it subtly, not to make it so explicit. Whatever.
BTW, i was mistaken above. The vilna jews suffered specifically. IIUC Pilsudski finally stopped these activities (good for him) Here are some descriptions:
""p.70
…that Jews ostensibly threw boiling water from the windows at Polish soldiers, that they spied for the Bolsheviks, that Jews snitched or that they were responsible for military defeats. The agitated military and civilian masses took out their anger on the Jews, hundreds of innocent victims died, thousands were injured, and countless others were left permanently disabled. Women were violated, Jewish properties were plundered, burnt, and destroyed. Jews were rounded up for forced labor, were beaten, and humiliated. The war was engineered on two fronts: setbacks on the military front were championed by the Poles as "victory" on the "Jewish front".
Not a day went by when "Haynt-censors notwithstanding-failed to report about the horrific pogroms, looting and assaults that the military, together with the local peasants and hooligans, committed against the Jews. During the Polish March to Kiev and thereafter, when the Bolsheviks entered Warsaw during their counter-offensive and even later, as the Polish army repelled the Russians, the pogroms and looting continued not only in the territories spanning the military lines on the front, but in all of Poland, including Warsaw, Jews were incessantly beaten and robbed. "Haynt" volume 109 (May 13, 1909) published the official communiqué from the official Polish telegraph agency "PAT", that by order of the Prime Minister a special commission was to be created to investigate the events in the Kolbusiev, Rapshitz, and Zheshoveh districts (western Galicia) which were "somewhat", according to the communiqué, "hostile to their Jewish population". No one ever found out what the commission's findings were and, in fact, what they had concluded. Two separate, bloody, pogroms occurred during those horrible days, weeks and months that were uniquely violent and took the lives of over 100 innocent Jews. These were the Vilna and Lida pogroms.
The pogrom in Vilna lasted three days, during Chol Hamoyed, Pesach (Passover), 1919. The Polish Army entered Vilna on April 19 and two days later, on the seventh day of Pesach, the army entered the neighborhood of the talented writer Isaac-Mayer Devenishsky (1878-1919), who published under the psudonym A. Vayter. He was staying at the home of the literary-historian and critic Shmuel Niger (1883-1955) and the poet Leib Yaffeh (1876-1948). Soldiers burst
p.71
into the building, violently dragged Vayter out in the street and shot him. Niger and Yaffeh survived amongst hundreds of other Jews who were arrested in Vilna and were driven out under a hail of bullets to Lida. The number of Vilna Jews murdered during that pogrom has never been firmly established. According to the Vilna registry of the (First World) War years and occupation, published in Vilna in 1922 (pages 319-321), in the suburb of Lopuvka alone 67 victims died; the English-Yiddish encyclopedia (volume 16, column 147) discloses that 80 Jews were murdered in the pogrom. The pogrom was marked by barbaric murders and terrifying violence; several victims were forced to dig their own graves prior to execution, while others were buried alive. The number of people taken during the mass arrests filled up two prisons, the railway station, the post-office courtyard, several private houses, and the local bank. According to a Vilna community report, between January 1, 1919 and August 15, 1920 (pages 6-8), hundreds of Jews, irrespective of age and gender, were viciously beaten either in their homes or on the streets and they were then thrown in jail. They were held without food or drink and were submitted to gross humiliation, physical and mental.
The majority of the arrested Jews were held in isolation in Lida and Bialystok, others were deported far from home to Kalisce, Krakow, and other towns in western Poland. "Haynt" (No. 110) from May 14, 1919 published a note that a Jewish delegation (commission) went out to Bialystok on May 13 in an attempt to arrange release for the interned Vilna Jews, which the delegation estimated to number around 400. A list of 155 Vilna Jews, living in Lida, was published in "Haynt" (No. 111), May 15, 1919 and a second list of 71 imprisoned Jews from Pinsk and Vilna was published two weeks later in No. 121, May 27, 1919. That group of prisoners was dispatched to the military camp Szczypiorno near Kalisz (Old: Kalisch). The same delegation informed "Haynt" that since the day they left Vilna, a week earlier, 56 dead were taken to Israel for burial. It should be noted that the arrested Jews remained in detention for a lengthy period prior to being released.
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:29
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quote:
Originally posted by Heresson
Btw, Vilnius was inhabited by Poles as were its surroundings, and belonged to Poland before to Russia.
It belonged to the Polish kingdom prior to the 18th c partitions, correct. That kingdom, IIIUC, allowed administrative autonomy to the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, though it is from that time that the Polish MINORITY in vilna dates. There were certainly more Poles in Vilna than Lithuanians, but prior to WW1 both were outnumbered by Jews, at least according the 1897 census.
I doubt local Jews started learning Polish only after ww1 |
Why do you doubt that? Pre partition youre going back to prenationalism - no public school systems - most Jews were primarly Yiddish speakers - they might have known a little Polish for business, but they lived by themselves, in the Ghetto.
Jewish modernization in Vilna took place in the 19th century, but IIUC there were no Polish schools in the city then - certainly no Polish PUBLIC schools (which were first established in the 1920's. Any Jews looking to learn a "gentile" language learned Russian, which was the language of the state.
Jews in Warsaw and Cracow learned Polish in the 19th century, but that was a very different environment.
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:29
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from myjewishlearning.com
"Beginning in the late 1920s, as the Depression hit Poland with particularly severity, popular discrimination such as economic boycotts, attacks on students at the universities, and quotas in some liberal professions resulted in a desperate situation for many Jews. Though no outright anti-Semitic legislation was enacted in Poland, as it was elsewhere in Eastern Europe at the time, the Polish government did not oppose economic discrimination against the Jews.
In 1934 Poland signed an anti-aggression pact with Germany, and in the same year the Polish government renounced its obligations under the Minorities' Treaty.
In the second half of the 1930s, economic boycotts escalated and physical attacks against Jews became more frequent, with pogroms occurring in various towns from 1935 until the first half of 1938, when the government began to clamp down on the violence.
Despite the anti-Jewish violence and the desperate situation of many Jews in the last years before World War II, the interwar years defy attempts to characterize Jewish life in Poland with broad strokes. These years were neither all "good for the Jews" nor all "bad for the Jews," as one historian, Ezra Mendelsohn, framed the debate, referring to the tendency to view the period as either a golden age or as a community whose destruction was already visible in the distance. This was, rather, a period when rapid changes within and without the Jewish world resulted in both dynamism and conflict."
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The Vagabond
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of realpolitik and counterpropaganda
Jan 1970
time: 05:29
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One more publication:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/ba94637e-6...000e2511c8.html
quote:
The west must not make an enemy of Putin
By Eric Kraus
Published: January 21 2005 02:00 | Last updated: January 21 2005 02:00
Once again, the west is getting Russia wrong. Opportunities to build a durable and constructive relationship with Europe's turbulent neighbour are falling victim to western arrogance and incomprehension.
Even a perfunctory glance at history shows that the decline of great empires is not usually a peaceful process. The Soviet Union provides what is perhaps a unique example of an empire putting itself into voluntary liquidation. Both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin knew that they had limited time to dismantle the Soviet system before the reactionary forces could regroup. Weak and domestically isolated, they courted western political support. Under their leadership, Russia acquiesced to the extension of a potentially hostile military alliance to its western borders - abandoning not just brutal Soviet imperialism, but also its legitimate security interests. The temptation to exploit Russian weakness has proved irresistible to Nato.
In the aftermath of the 1998 debt crisis, Russia was widely portrayed as terminally weak and divided - doomed to decay, to default, to disintegration. The oligarchs were rightfully seen as uncontrollable, able to buy or intimidate anyone standing in their way, manipulating the political system to feed their own boundless greed. In parallel, the flow of power into the hands of the regional governors rendered Russia largely ungovernable.
Is it not odd then that the taming of both oligarchs and regional potentates by Vladimir Putin, the president, has been greeted internationally not with praise but with invective? Yukos - an oil company with its own foreign policy - effectively launched a hostile takeover bid for the Russian state. It used its vast wealth to buy a bloc of deputies large enough to obstruct any legislation not to its liking, by joining their votes with those of the Communists. Until the fall of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Yukos's jailed chief executive and until recently a key shareholder, the oligarchs repeatedly blocked the imposition of the windfall oil profit taxes necessary to rebalance the Russian economy. The dismantling of Yukos has been badly mishandled. But had the Russian government allowed the oligarchs' stranglehold to be restored, a repeat of the financial catastrophes of the late 1990s was in the offing.
Unlike his predecessors, Mr Putin plays to a domestic audience. Under his watch, Russia has become a far more prosperous and self-assured place. Although the economy remains unbalanced, growth has been impressive - Russia has gone from insolvency to being a big net creditor. A large middle class has sprung up. Wages and pensions are now paid in cash and on time. High oil prices have helped, but they were also high in 1996, yet the proceeds were stripped and hidden offshore by the same oligarchs who are now coming under the whip.
In foreign policy terms, Russia no longer writes blank cheques for the west. Perhaps as a result, and aided by a hugely professional Yukos public relations campaign, the Putin administration is encountering the sort of press hostility ordinarily reserved for members of the axis of evil.
The protests come not only from the western media; perhaps the shrillest invective comes from a tiny minority of Russian professional dissidents. Isolated and ignored at home and desperate for western approval, the latter are in no way representative of the Russian people. Although the political demise of the Russian liberals is to be lamented, they were victims of their own folly. Admired abroad, at home they were perceived as being aligned with the rapacious and thieving oligarchs, as well as with the western powers who find a weak and subservient Russia a safer option.
Mr Putin is genuinely popular at home, and the west will have to learn to live with Russia's choice. It is absurd to expect Swiss standards of democracy from a country struggling to rebuild itself after the traumas of the past decades. Liberal democracy remains as much an alien concept under Mr Putin as it was under Mr Yeltsin. But as Russia develops into a middle-class country, it will gradually acquire political institutions more similar to those of its western neighbours.
The ability of the west to influence events within Russia is rapidly waning. Even if other countries had the means to destabilise the Putin regime, any successor would almost certainly be more threatening. Although military confrontation is no longer an imminent danger, under pressure Russia would probably turn east. It would seek a strategic alliance with a China desperate for Russian resources, a gift the west would come to regret.
The writer is chief strategist for Sovlink Securities, Moscow
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02-02-2005 01:41
SInce when resistance to being encircled by a hostile military alliance counts as imperialism?
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