The first paragraph really spoke to me, because that is how I spent every summer for the first 14 years of my life. My family took a trip from Kiev to Yalta as a summer vacation. The joy and excitement mixed with hot, gross conditions of the train are spot on. I will forever hold onto those memories as some of my most precious.
This year I went back to Kiev for the first time in well over a decade since I moved to the US. To see my family, friends, as well as show my wife all of the places and the way that I grew up.
Due to the current political climate and overall conditions in Crimea going there was not even an option for us. A real disappointment as some of my most cherished memories were formed there.
I am pretty sure that visiting Crimea would have been a safer option to visiting Kiev. Many, many Ukrainian citizens continue to visit the peninsula even today.
This isn't something to have an argument over. However, while in Kiev I did not see a single armed person nor any signs of conflict. My visit was almost a month ago.
On the flip side, Crimean border is protected by armed forces on behalf of Russia and overall sentiment in the peninsula is not that favorable to Ukrainians.
Though I do agree that many still visit. My only point was that I did not feel comfortable.
In terms of Kingdom of the Dead, what is interesting is that the Black Plague (which would kill about 1/3 of Europe) is speculated by some to have entered Europe from Crimea due to the siege of Caffa (also spelled Kaffa) by the Tatars. The Tatar army was devastated by the Plague, and before they left, they catapulted the infected bodies into the city. In the city were Genoese traders who left the city and took the Plague back to Europe.
Why here? Does this hipster's travel diaries contain some valuable advice for startups?
Update: you might downvote this into oblivion, but objectively this text has nothing of value, but naive, oversimplified views and generalizations any traveler could produce. I honestly cannot see why it should be published here, on HN. There are specialized sites for narcissistic "writers" - medium.com etc.
Can someone explain what is the meaning of "madeleine" here? Is it referring to the famous incident of "let them eat cake"? I'm not familiar with it being used to refer to anything other than food.
It's a reference to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, wherein he famously recounted how, upon eating a "dispiriting" madeline as an adult, he was abruptly and involuntarily taken back to the emotions of childhood, when he and an aunt shared madelines every Sunday. Since then, it's shorthand for "something that emotionally transports us back to happier times," more or less.
I wasn't familiar with the term, but Wiktionary has some good hints:
n. A small gateau or sponge cake, often shaped like an elongated scallop shell.
n. Something which brings back a memory; a source of nostalgia or evocative memories (used with reference to its function in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time).
That seems to be how it's used in the article and some of the comments here:
"Crimea was the ideal site for this post-Soviet reunion, since it was the place where so many children, now adults, had spent their happy summer vacations, flocking there from all over the Soviet Union. For post-Soviet people, Crimea was a gigantic madeleine."
I see others have beat me to a response. m-w also has a paragraph about it:
"The madeleine is said to have been named after a 19th-century French cook named Madeleine Paumier, but it was the French author Marcel Proust who immortalized the pastry in his 1913 book Swann's Way, the first volume of his seven-part novel Remembrance of Things Past. In that work, a taste of tea-soaked cake evokes a surge of memory and nostalgia. As more and more readers chewed on the profound mnemonic power attributed to a mere morsel of cake, the word madeleine itself became a designation for anything that evokes a memory."
>since it was the place where so many children, now adults, had spent their happy summer vacations, flocking there from all over the Soviet Union.
yes, Russian climate makes you yearn for hot climate vacation near sea and giving the Iron Curtain there weren't much options. These days Russians go en mass to Mediterranean : Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Chernogorya, Italy, Spain. Despite all the propaganda they aren't going to Crimea. As joke has it these days "it is so quiet on Crimea beaches that one can hear Russian tourists having drink party ("buhayuschih") on Egypt beaches"
This is also the reason that you sometimes find Madeleines flavored with earl gray tea. It's something of a literary joke about Proust, who helped make the cookies famous.
> They called the Tatars “heathens,” “uncivilized” and “warlike,” evoking old stereotypes about the Turks.
That resonated with me. My childhood is peppered with memories of Russians, who were bused in at some point by the Soviet Union to take over administrative positions, telling me to speak a "human" language - Russian instead of my native language (implying I was sub-human). I always remember that and am sad for them for living with that kind of prejudice (especially when you tell that to a child).
On the other hand, Soviets/Russians did not kill the native population of the republics on massive scale, did not have "sits only for white" in the public transit, had 15 republics where native languages had equal representation with Russian. Everything is relative.
If you are from a Baltic country there is no point to argue with you, because the sentiment against Russia and everything Russian, for whatever reason, is so strong, that people celebrate Nazis as heroes, just because they against Russia. Holodomor was not a genocide against Ukranians, it was ideologically charged event, so it is not comparable to genocide gainst Native Americans, or lynching. "And you lynching Negroes" is more applicable to you line of argumentation than to mine; the way minorities were treated in post-Stalin USSR and America of 40-50-60s is absolutely incomparable, not even close. I myself grew up in former republic of USSR and can attest that Russian and the local language (let say Azerbaijani; may be it was a different one) had equal representation with Russian and all the position of local power were stuffed by the local ethnicities.
> Holodomor was not a genocide against Ukranians, it was ideologically charged event
This is still a debatable point, with no clear agreed definition.
"The Holodomor genocide question consists of the attempts to determine whether the Holodomor, the catastrophic man-made famine of 1933 that claimed millions of lives in Ukraine, was an ethnic genocide or an unintended result of the "Soviet regime's re-direction of already drought-reduced grain supplies to attain economic and political goals." The event is recognized as a crime against humanity by the European Parliament, and a genocide in Ukraine, while the Russian Federation considers it part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33 and corresponding famine relief effort The debate among historians is ongoing and there is no international consensus among scholars or governments on whether the Soviet policies that caused the famine fall under the legal definition of genocide."[1]
However you view it, it was an horrific event where millions died of hunger.
It was not directed against Ukranians as ethnos, period. USSR was not a Russian supremacist country. Remember, Stalin, during whose reign Holodomor happened was a Georgian, Khruschev was Ukranian, Brezhnev - Ukranian, Andropov - Russian, Chernenko - Ukranian, Gorbachev - half Ukranian. So most of supreme leaders of USSR were at least partially Ukranians.
It was not directed against Ukranians as ethnos, period.
The scholarly debate on this issue is to say the least, very complex. You can't just say "it wasn't directed against Ukrainians as a people, period."
Khruschev was Ukrainian,
Khrushchev was born to poor parents of Russian descent. Anyway, while hardly a saint, he doesn't appear to had much, if any, role in the Holomodor. Chernenko is generally regarded to be of mixed background. As to Brezhnev,
Brezhnev was born on 19 December 1906 in Kamianske in Ukraine), to metalworker Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev and his wife, Natalia Denisovna Mazalova. His parents used to live in Brezhnevo (Kursky District, Kursk Oblast, Russia) before moving to Kamenskoe. Brezhnev's ethnicity was specified as Ukrainian in some documents, including his passport, and Russian in others. --WP
The most "Ukrainian" of any of these may have been Gorbachev. But we all know where he sits in the pantheon of "supreme leaders" of the USSR.
You can try to spin it anyway you want. Stalin, as Georgian, had no, absolutely no feeling towards Ukranians, as for example Finnish people have zero feelings towards Portuguese. There was no desire to eradicate Ukranians as ethnicity, in a way Hitler tried to eradicate Jewish people. There was no desire to destroy Ukranian culture. In fact, Khruschev , no matter what official sources say, was widely considered to be Ukranian, has always been seen wearing Ukranian ethical closing, and was instrumental in moving Crimea to Ukraine from Russia. Ukranian writers, such as Gogol, Shevchenko were considered extremly important part of Soviet culture,and no matter what was the resublic you lived at it was taught in the schools.
Nothing close to the treatment of Native Americans, Asians and Blacks in the post-war United States.
There was no desire to eradicate Ukranians as ethnicity, in a way Hitler tried to eradicate Jewish people. There was no desire to destroy Ukranian culture.
Just because the Holomodor wasn't directly comparable to the Nazi genocides doesn't mean that (1) the Ukrainian people didn't suffer disproportionately during the 1932-1933 famine, and (2) the Soviet leadership (or the subset responsible for the Holomodor) wasn't aware of this fact, as it was happening.
> did not kill the native population of the republics on massive scale,
You're kidding right? They sent the local village priest to Siberia. Took away the land my great grand father owned.
Sent tens of thousands of other people to Siberia to labor camp. Yeah if you consider shoving them like cattle into unheated train cars in the middle of the winter for a multi-week journey "not kill" then yes, they just happened to freeze on their own...
There was atrocities during Stalin times true. However they were purely ideological by nature; not against ethnicities, cultures etc (those were in fact actively preserved) - Stalin himself was from a tiny minority nation of Georgians. USA, OTOH, eradicated native Americans on a large scale, brought slaves with destroying their culture. USSR after Stalin was far, far less racist than USA, up until its fall in 1990s.
However they were purely ideological by nature; not against ethnicities, cultures etc (those were in fact actively preserved)
Given the number of, literally, whole peoples picked up, stuffed into boxcars and dumped somewhere halfway across the country (and I bet you can name at least one very famous example from May 1944), and ample evidence of forced Russification in various contexts during the Soviet era -- this is, quite simply, a very weird and bizarre statement to make.
Have you ever been to the former USSR? I am not sure about what you mean by "forced russification" - 15 republics of ex-USSR had two state languages one Russian, one local. Almost every product, produced for local consumption had bilingual package (much like in Canada), (industrial goods manuals however were purely in Russian). Parents could choose if they want their children to be taught in their native languages or in Russian. Every document was bilingual. universities were bilingual (and still are in some republics with significant Russian minorities). Local artist, writers and poets who wrote in local languages were kept in a high regard, received bonuses, medals and all that things.
Overall, "forced russification" was about as bad as "forced Anglification" in Canada. Most of the republics of USSR were similar to Quebec in terms of being dominated by the language and culture of the majority.
Have you seen Spanish-teaching universities in the USA? I have not.
I'd prefer not get too much into personal identity or travel itineraries, if you don't mind. Let's just say I have plenty of shared personal context with the former USSR (enough to have found about the topic first through personal contacts, rather than stuff I read in the press or online).
I am not sure about what you mean by "forced russification"
Of course forced Anglicization has existed in nearly all parts of the former British Empire, also, and of course the original inhabitants (and other non-Anglophones) of these areas have been treated in many horrible ways long after independence, in some places still are up until the present day, etc, etc. But these are different topics.
Have you seen Spanish-teaching universities in the USA? I have not.
If you follow the definition literally, then yes. Yet, Russia always was very careful with the culture of the colonies, way more careful than Britain, France and Westerners in General.
> But these are different topics.
No, actually not. Russia is always disproportionately blamed for being a cultural oppressor, however as an Empire, USSR needed a single unifying culture and language. In that respect, Russians were much less oppressing and arrogant than the British, Spaniards or French.
Russia is always disproportionately blamed for being a cultural oppressor,
Might have something to do with the early 20th-century body count (whereas most of the other empires managed to get their megakilling sprees wrapped up by 1900 or so). Along with all those sinister Russian accents in Hollywood movies. But yeah, friends of mine have confessed this feeling to me, also (that, as Russians, they feel unduly blamed / hated by the world).
...however as an Empire, USSR needed a single unifying culture and language
Same justification used by... basically every other major empire on the planet, you know.
Either way, this is all getting very far afield from the topic of the original article.
> purely ideological by nature; not against ethnicities, cultures etc (those were in fact actively preserved) - Stalin himself was from a tiny minority nation of Georgians.
It doesn't matter what the official stance was, what matters what happened. My own relatives were sent to Siberia for being ethnic minorities, despite that they fought for the reds with the russian troupes in the finnish civil war. You can make excuses as much as you like that it wasn't because of ethnicity but reality was that ideology didn't matter back then. People are hateful by nature, especially to foreign cultures, taking away the lands that feeds your children and sending all men in your family to Siberian death camp doesn't sound like preserving any minority culture to me.
Nothing you said is a proof that what happened has roots in state-wide hate against particular minority. It's personal and biased.
My grandparents were stripped of all land as well and I am 100% certain it was not because of ethnicity since they were of the same as the ruling ethnic majority.
What you are explaining is probably local authorities - humans hated your relatives because of their ethnicity and that was one of the reason they got sent to Siberia. Taking land though was widespread in USSR. It was taken from ethnic Russians as well.
The fact that minorities survived and thrived on the same scale as Russians and got sent and taken land from on the same scale as Russians and got sent to Siberia on the same scale as Russians is a proof that there was no policy to destroy particular minority on a state level. It was a policy to destroy enemies of the state.
The fact that minorities survived and thrived on the same scale as Russians and got sent and taken land from on the same scale as Russians and got sent to Siberia on the same scale as Russians is a proof that there was no policy to destroy particular minority on a state level. It was a policy to destroy enemies of the state.
It is a matter of historical record beyond dispute that certain ethnic groups (e.g. Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Balts, Tatars, Cossacks, Chechen and Ingush, in particular) were murdered, deported and suffered otherwise disproportionately during Stalin's reign.
You can argue whether this was motivated out of some pure "hatred" or not -- but if so, you'd be splitting hairs.
Russians have a question: "why do they not love us?".
Instead of admitting that this was wrong and horrible, and understand the part of Russians in it, some (I like to keep this option open that some do not) start to find utterly stupid excuses for it.
Maybe you try to be a different person? A better person, one that could be loved and cherished by your neighbours?
Saying that others did it too or that we also suffered does not cut it.
See, that you suffered because of a tyrant of your is your own fault, that you also together with your tyrant terrorised your neighbours is your fault. Until you keep justifying it, you will not find respect.
The Tatars, 300 years ago, were excellent warriors and horsemen.
They would raid the nearby Ukrainian and Russian villages and sell the villagers into slavery. In one year, 1769, they captured 20,000 and sold them in slave markets in the Ottoman Empire.
From 1500 to 1700 or so, between 1 and 2 million Slavs were captured and sold off into slavery.
The end of the Crimean Khanate is about as distant in history as the Revolutionary War that started the USA. Of course Tatars don't do this anymore, but some people unfortunately prefer to remember old grievances and raise them again and again.
That's why when I see photos of the Syrian war, I see so many blond and blue eyed children. I assume they are the descendants of the Slavs(slaves) you are talking about
Syria is next to Turkey (which is itself populated by a lot of Central Asians; Turkmen are not native of Turkey), which is next to Europe. These two countries and Lebanon are on the morphological boundary between "Europeans" and "Arabs". (This is a gross simplification.)
You have no clue what you're talking about. To begin with, Slavs != "slaves". Learn the etymology of the word and read up on some history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs Once you're done, use Wikipea or Google to look for Indo-Iranians, their physical characteristics and their movement from 4000-1000 BCE ((TL;DR blue-eyed people didn't originate in Europe). Good luck.
Origin of the word Slave :
"The term slave has its origins in the word slav. The slavs, who inhabited a large part of Eastern Europe, were taken as slaves by the Muslims of Spain during the ninth century AD."
46 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadThis year I went back to Kiev for the first time in well over a decade since I moved to the US. To see my family, friends, as well as show my wife all of the places and the way that I grew up.
Due to the current political climate and overall conditions in Crimea going there was not even an option for us. A real disappointment as some of my most cherished memories were formed there.
On the flip side, Crimean border is protected by armed forces on behalf of Russia and overall sentiment in the peninsula is not that favorable to Ukrainians.
Though I do agree that many still visit. My only point was that I did not feel comfortable.
Update: you might downvote this into oblivion, but objectively this text has nothing of value, but naive, oversimplified views and generalizations any traveler could produce. I honestly cannot see why it should be published here, on HN. There are specialized sites for narcissistic "writers" - medium.com etc.
n. A small gateau or sponge cake, often shaped like an elongated scallop shell.
n. Something which brings back a memory; a source of nostalgia or evocative memories (used with reference to its function in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time).
That seems to be how it's used in the article and some of the comments here:
"Crimea was the ideal site for this post-Soviet reunion, since it was the place where so many children, now adults, had spent their happy summer vacations, flocking there from all over the Soviet Union. For post-Soviet people, Crimea was a gigantic madeleine."
I see others have beat me to a response. m-w also has a paragraph about it:
"The madeleine is said to have been named after a 19th-century French cook named Madeleine Paumier, but it was the French author Marcel Proust who immortalized the pastry in his 1913 book Swann's Way, the first volume of his seven-part novel Remembrance of Things Past. In that work, a taste of tea-soaked cake evokes a surge of memory and nostalgia. As more and more readers chewed on the profound mnemonic power attributed to a mere morsel of cake, the word madeleine itself became a designation for anything that evokes a memory."
I had never heard of it either.
yes, Russian climate makes you yearn for hot climate vacation near sea and giving the Iron Curtain there weren't much options. These days Russians go en mass to Mediterranean : Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Chernogorya, Italy, Spain. Despite all the propaganda they aren't going to Crimea. As joke has it these days "it is so quiet on Crimea beaches that one can hear Russian tourists having drink party ("buhayuschih") on Egypt beaches"
That resonated with me. My childhood is peppered with memories of Russians, who were bused in at some point by the Soviet Union to take over administrative positions, telling me to speak a "human" language - Russian instead of my native language (implying I was sub-human). I always remember that and am sad for them for living with that kind of prejudice (especially when you tell that to a child).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
> did not have "sits only for white" in the public transit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
> native languages had equal representation with Russian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
This is still a debatable point, with no clear agreed definition.
"The Holodomor genocide question consists of the attempts to determine whether the Holodomor, the catastrophic man-made famine of 1933 that claimed millions of lives in Ukraine, was an ethnic genocide or an unintended result of the "Soviet regime's re-direction of already drought-reduced grain supplies to attain economic and political goals." The event is recognized as a crime against humanity by the European Parliament, and a genocide in Ukraine, while the Russian Federation considers it part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33 and corresponding famine relief effort The debate among historians is ongoing and there is no international consensus among scholars or governments on whether the Soviet policies that caused the famine fall under the legal definition of genocide."[1]
However you view it, it was an horrific event where millions died of hunger.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question
The scholarly debate on this issue is to say the least, very complex. You can't just say "it wasn't directed against Ukrainians as a people, period."
Khruschev was Ukrainian,
Khrushchev was born to poor parents of Russian descent. Anyway, while hardly a saint, he doesn't appear to had much, if any, role in the Holomodor. Chernenko is generally regarded to be of mixed background. As to Brezhnev,
Brezhnev was born on 19 December 1906 in Kamianske in Ukraine), to metalworker Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev and his wife, Natalia Denisovna Mazalova. His parents used to live in Brezhnevo (Kursky District, Kursk Oblast, Russia) before moving to Kamenskoe. Brezhnev's ethnicity was specified as Ukrainian in some documents, including his passport, and Russian in others. --WP
The most "Ukrainian" of any of these may have been Gorbachev. But we all know where he sits in the pantheon of "supreme leaders" of the USSR.
Nothing close to the treatment of Native Americans, Asians and Blacks in the post-war United States.
Just because the Holomodor wasn't directly comparable to the Nazi genocides doesn't mean that (1) the Ukrainian people didn't suffer disproportionately during the 1932-1933 famine, and (2) the Soviet leadership (or the subset responsible for the Holomodor) wasn't aware of this fact, as it was happening.
"If you are from a Baltic country <..> people celebrate Nazis as heroes, just because they against Russia."
No. Simply no.
You're kidding right? They sent the local village priest to Siberia. Took away the land my great grand father owned.
Sent tens of thousands of other people to Siberia to labor camp. Yeah if you consider shoving them like cattle into unheated train cars in the middle of the winter for a multi-week journey "not kill" then yes, they just happened to freeze on their own...
Given the number of, literally, whole peoples picked up, stuffed into boxcars and dumped somewhere halfway across the country (and I bet you can name at least one very famous example from May 1944), and ample evidence of forced Russification in various contexts during the Soviet era -- this is, quite simply, a very weird and bizarre statement to make.
Overall, "forced russification" was about as bad as "forced Anglification" in Canada. Most of the republics of USSR were similar to Quebec in terms of being dominated by the language and culture of the majority.
Have you seen Spanish-teaching universities in the USA? I have not.
I'd prefer not get too much into personal identity or travel itineraries, if you don't mind. Let's just say I have plenty of shared personal context with the former USSR (enough to have found about the topic first through personal contacts, rather than stuff I read in the press or online).
I am not sure about what you mean by "forced russification"
It's kind of hard not to, these days:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification#Under_the_Soviet...
Of course forced Anglicization has existed in nearly all parts of the former British Empire, also, and of course the original inhabitants (and other non-Anglophones) of these areas have been treated in many horrible ways long after independence, in some places still are up until the present day, etc, etc. But these are different topics.
Have you seen Spanish-teaching universities in the USA? I have not.
You might want to look at Puerto Rico.
If you follow the definition literally, then yes. Yet, Russia always was very careful with the culture of the colonies, way more careful than Britain, France and Westerners in General.
> But these are different topics.
No, actually not. Russia is always disproportionately blamed for being a cultural oppressor, however as an Empire, USSR needed a single unifying culture and language. In that respect, Russians were much less oppressing and arrogant than the British, Spaniards or French.
> You might want to look at Puerto Rico.
I want one in Texas.
Might have something to do with the early 20th-century body count (whereas most of the other empires managed to get their megakilling sprees wrapped up by 1900 or so). Along with all those sinister Russian accents in Hollywood movies. But yeah, friends of mine have confessed this feeling to me, also (that, as Russians, they feel unduly blamed / hated by the world).
...however as an Empire, USSR needed a single unifying culture and language
Same justification used by... basically every other major empire on the planet, you know.
Either way, this is all getting very far afield from the topic of the original article.
I have. Yes they did forced Russification.
It doesn't matter what the official stance was, what matters what happened. My own relatives were sent to Siberia for being ethnic minorities, despite that they fought for the reds with the russian troupes in the finnish civil war. You can make excuses as much as you like that it wasn't because of ethnicity but reality was that ideology didn't matter back then. People are hateful by nature, especially to foreign cultures, taking away the lands that feeds your children and sending all men in your family to Siberian death camp doesn't sound like preserving any minority culture to me.
My grandparents were stripped of all land as well and I am 100% certain it was not because of ethnicity since they were of the same as the ruling ethnic majority.
What you are explaining is probably local authorities - humans hated your relatives because of their ethnicity and that was one of the reason they got sent to Siberia. Taking land though was widespread in USSR. It was taken from ethnic Russians as well.
The fact that minorities survived and thrived on the same scale as Russians and got sent and taken land from on the same scale as Russians and got sent to Siberia on the same scale as Russians is a proof that there was no policy to destroy particular minority on a state level. It was a policy to destroy enemies of the state.
It is a matter of historical record beyond dispute that certain ethnic groups (e.g. Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Balts, Tatars, Cossacks, Chechen and Ingush, in particular) were murdered, deported and suffered otherwise disproportionately during Stalin's reign.
You can argue whether this was motivated out of some pure "hatred" or not -- but if so, you'd be splitting hairs.
Instead of admitting that this was wrong and horrible, and understand the part of Russians in it, some (I like to keep this option open that some do not) start to find utterly stupid excuses for it.
Maybe you try to be a different person? A better person, one that could be loved and cherished by your neighbours?
Saying that others did it too or that we also suffered does not cut it.
See, that you suffered because of a tyrant of your is your own fault, that you also together with your tyrant terrorised your neighbours is your fault. Until you keep justifying it, you will not find respect.
They would raid the nearby Ukrainian and Russian villages and sell the villagers into slavery. In one year, 1769, they captured 20,000 and sold them in slave markets in the Ottoman Empire.
From 1500 to 1700 or so, between 1 and 2 million Slavs were captured and sold off into slavery.
The end of the Crimean Khanate is about as distant in history as the Revolutionary War that started the USA. Of course Tatars don't do this anymore, but some people unfortunately prefer to remember old grievances and raise them again and again.
Source BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafr...