Notes and quotations from "Black Square - Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine" by Sophie Pinkham
"...2013-14, when Ukraine had another revolution < > more spontaneous than the Orange Revolution a decade earlier, it became known simply as Maidan, for Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev's Independence Square, the site of mass protests that lasted for three months < > More than a hundred people were killed during the protests; some ten thousand died in the war that followed."
"His{Yushchenko's} prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, was a Russian-speaking oligarch from Dnipropetrovsk, in south-central Ukraine. She was canny enough to polish up her Ukrainian and do her hair in phony wheat-gold braids, modeling her image on the Berehynia, a dangerous female water spirit rebranded as a mother goddess."!!
"Ukraine's bilingualism made it an easier place to learn Russian than Russia itself."
"In 1887 Habsburg geographers declared a village near Rakhiv the "geographical center of Europe."" Rakhiv is a town in the Carpathian Mountains in far southwestern Ukraine near the border with Romania. "The ethno-national identities that we take for granted today were largely the product of nineteenth-century nationalist movements that created "imagined communities," a sense of blood relation between people who had never met and who had dramatically different ways of life."
"Lviv was part of Poland from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where it was called Lemburg. < > In the nineteenth century Lemburg was mostly Polish, German, and Jewish, though the surrounding countryside was full of peasants who called themselves Ruthenians, and who were learning to call themselves Ukrainians. < > After World War I Lemburg became Lwo'w, a Polish city in which only one-sixth of the inhabitants were Ukrainians.
"During the Second World War the city went to the Soviets and then the Germans, becoming part of the Soviet Union after the war ended. It was renamed Lvov < > Lvov's Jews had been killed in concentration camps, mass shootings, or pogroms, and its Poles and Germans had been driven out, deported, or killed."
"When I saw the documentary All Things Ablaze, < > I realized that there were many versions of Maidan. < > As in reality, it isn't clear who started the violence, or who is fighting for what, exactly. It often seems that people may be fighting just for the sake of it."
"On May 11, 2014, the Donbas separatists held referenda < > Only Russia recognized them{the landslide votes in favor of independence} as legitimate. But as in Crimea, many people in Donetsk and Luhansk truly did want to distance themselves from Kiev's new government and to put themselves under Russian protection."
"Ukraine was trying hard to distance itself from the Soviet past. It declared May 8 "Victory in Europe" Day and replaced the Soviet term "Great Patriotic War" with "Second World War" in keeping with European practice."
"Shortly after Victory Day, Poroshenko signed new laws that attached criminal penalties to the display of Soviet and Nazi symbols in almost any context, and prohibited any denial of the "criminal character of the communist totalitarian regime of 1917-91 in Ukraine.""
"The new laws were an act of symbolic violence against the civilization in which many Ukrainians grew up, and for which millions of Ukrainians lost their lives while fighting the Nazis. < > Thousands of signs had to be changed and monuments removed, replaced with the heroes of the moment."
Thursday, February 23, 2017
Sunday, February 19, 2017
Experimental Blog # 210
Notes and quotations from "Bears in the Streets - Three Journeys across a Changing Russia" by Lisa Dickey
The author, Lisa Dickey, first went to Moscow in 1988, where she lived at the American embassy compound for 7 months. It is interesting that her mother, who was married to an American military serviceman{the author's father}, took an arranged tour of Soviet cities in 1976. Then in 1994 Lisa Dickey moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, hoping to make her living as a writer.
This book is a highly informative account of three journeys that the author made in 1995, 2005, and 2015. The first two journeys she made with a partner, but the third journey she made by herself. All three times she went to the same places: Vladivostok, Birobidzhan, Chita, Ulan-Ude, Galtai, Baikal, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Kazan, Moscow, and St. Petersburg; and, as much as possible, she met with the same people.
"In the late 1920s, < > Joseph Stalin decided to create a Jewish homeland in Russia. < > the government's decree designated land "near the Amur River in the Far East" < > the Soviet government in 1934 designated the area as the Jewish Autonomous Region, with Birobidzhan as its capital. < > by 1948 the region's Jewish population had swelled to 30,000. < > By the end of 1992, fewer than 5,000 Jews were left there. < > and "official figures showing just 1,700 Jews living here now ...", apparently in 2015.
"Lake Baikal < > holds one-fifth of the earth's freshwater - about the same amount found in all the Great Lakes put together, although they have eight times the surface area."
A conversation:
"Generally speaking, it's not good for Russia when a Democrat is president," Sergei told me. I asked whether they liked George W. Bush better, and both of them puckered again.
" So, which American president did you like, then?" I asked. "Assuming there were any."
"Ronald Reagan," they both said, to my amazement. The "Mr, Gorbachev, tear down this wall" president, the man who took credit for destroying the USSR - this is who they liked? "He stood for something," said Sergei. "He said what he believed. He wasn't sneaky."
The author, Lisa Dickey, first went to Moscow in 1988, where she lived at the American embassy compound for 7 months. It is interesting that her mother, who was married to an American military serviceman{the author's father}, took an arranged tour of Soviet cities in 1976. Then in 1994 Lisa Dickey moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, hoping to make her living as a writer.
This book is a highly informative account of three journeys that the author made in 1995, 2005, and 2015. The first two journeys she made with a partner, but the third journey she made by herself. All three times she went to the same places: Vladivostok, Birobidzhan, Chita, Ulan-Ude, Galtai, Baikal, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Kazan, Moscow, and St. Petersburg; and, as much as possible, she met with the same people.
"In the late 1920s, < > Joseph Stalin decided to create a Jewish homeland in Russia. < > the government's decree designated land "near the Amur River in the Far East" < > the Soviet government in 1934 designated the area as the Jewish Autonomous Region, with Birobidzhan as its capital. < > by 1948 the region's Jewish population had swelled to 30,000. < > By the end of 1992, fewer than 5,000 Jews were left there. < > and "official figures showing just 1,700 Jews living here now ...", apparently in 2015.
"Lake Baikal < > holds one-fifth of the earth's freshwater - about the same amount found in all the Great Lakes put together, although they have eight times the surface area."
A conversation:
"Generally speaking, it's not good for Russia when a Democrat is president," Sergei told me. I asked whether they liked George W. Bush better, and both of them puckered again.
" So, which American president did you like, then?" I asked. "Assuming there were any."
"Ronald Reagan," they both said, to my amazement. The "Mr, Gorbachev, tear down this wall" president, the man who took credit for destroying the USSR - this is who they liked? "He stood for something," said Sergei. "He said what he believed. He wasn't sneaky."
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Experimental Blog # 209
Quotations and notes from "Neanderthal Man" - In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Paabo
"Since the nucleus has two copies of the genome - it contains about 6.4 billion nucleotide pairs. By comparison, the mitochondrial DNA is tiny, with a little over 16, 500 nucleotide pairs ..."
"We compared the Neanderthal mtDNA with that of 510 Europeans < > 478 Africans < > 494 Asians. The average number of differences from the mtDNAs of these people was also twenty-eight."
" ... the Neanderthal mtDNA did not trace back to this Mitochondrial Eve but went further back before it shared an ancestor with the mtDNAs of humans alive today."
".. the ancestor that the Neanderthal mtDNA shared with human mtDNAs lived about 500,000 years ago .."
The author describes at great length the constantly changing and improving methods and amazing machines that were used in these genetic researches; so that tasks that once required weeks or even months to accomplish could be done in one day or over night.
" .. some paleontologists claimed that they saw Neanderthal traits in the skeletons of early modern people in Europe."
"And eventually the Neanderthal DNA would spread throughout the population so everyone would have some proportion of it. < > it would not become further diluted but remain indefinitely in the population. Also, if mixing did happen, it likely didn't occur only once."
"We had 1.2 million nucleotides of Neanderthal DNA determined from Vindija < > about 400,000 < > from Neander Valley < > 300,000 < > from El Sidron ..."
"Nevertheless, the ancestors of people today and the ancestors of Neanderthals probably went their separate ways at least 300,000 years ago."
"Whenever an African and a non-African were compared, the Neanderthal matched the non-African at around 2 percent more SNPs than did the African. There did indeed seem to be a small but clearly discernible genetic contribution from Neanderthals to people outside Africa, no matter where they lived."
" ... about 2 percent of the DNA of people even in China comes from Neanderthals."
" ...a different analysis < > asked how far Europeans and Asians are toward being 100 percent Neanderthals. The answer varied between 1.3 and 2.7 percent."
"The dirty little secret of genomics is that we still know next to nothing about how a genome translates into the particularities of a living and breathing individual. < > I realized that we would not be able to directly identify the genetic underpinnings of the differences between Neanderthals and modern humans."
"Since the nucleus has two copies of the genome - it contains about 6.4 billion nucleotide pairs. By comparison, the mitochondrial DNA is tiny, with a little over 16, 500 nucleotide pairs ..."
"We compared the Neanderthal mtDNA with that of 510 Europeans < > 478 Africans < > 494 Asians. The average number of differences from the mtDNAs of these people was also twenty-eight."
" ... the Neanderthal mtDNA did not trace back to this Mitochondrial Eve but went further back before it shared an ancestor with the mtDNAs of humans alive today."
".. the ancestor that the Neanderthal mtDNA shared with human mtDNAs lived about 500,000 years ago .."
The author describes at great length the constantly changing and improving methods and amazing machines that were used in these genetic researches; so that tasks that once required weeks or even months to accomplish could be done in one day or over night.
" .. some paleontologists claimed that they saw Neanderthal traits in the skeletons of early modern people in Europe."
"And eventually the Neanderthal DNA would spread throughout the population so everyone would have some proportion of it. < > it would not become further diluted but remain indefinitely in the population. Also, if mixing did happen, it likely didn't occur only once."
"We had 1.2 million nucleotides of Neanderthal DNA determined from Vindija < > about 400,000 < > from Neander Valley < > 300,000 < > from El Sidron ..."
"Nevertheless, the ancestors of people today and the ancestors of Neanderthals probably went their separate ways at least 300,000 years ago."
"Whenever an African and a non-African were compared, the Neanderthal matched the non-African at around 2 percent more SNPs than did the African. There did indeed seem to be a small but clearly discernible genetic contribution from Neanderthals to people outside Africa, no matter where they lived."
" ... about 2 percent of the DNA of people even in China comes from Neanderthals."
" ...a different analysis < > asked how far Europeans and Asians are toward being 100 percent Neanderthals. The answer varied between 1.3 and 2.7 percent."
"The dirty little secret of genomics is that we still know next to nothing about how a genome translates into the particularities of a living and breathing individual. < > I realized that we would not be able to directly identify the genetic underpinnings of the differences between Neanderthals and modern humans."
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