Quotations from and comments about "The Future is History" - How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen
"I spent my thirties and forties documenting the death of a Russian democracy that had really never come to be. Different people were telling different stories about this: many insisted that Russia had merely taken a step back after taking two steps toward democracy; some laid the blame on Vladimir Putin and the KGB; others on a supposed Russian love of the iron fist, and still others on an inconsiderate, imperious West."
"Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. < > The leaders of many of the Soviet Union's constituent republics were becoming lax in monitoring and containing nationalist forces..."
"The cliche' of the era was "floodgates." Everyone in every field was claiming that the floodgates had opened."
"For over a generation before Gorbachev came to power, Politburo membership had generally been a lifetime appointment. <> Gorbachev started reshuffling the Central Commottee's membership several times a year ..."
"One after another, the Eastern European states allowed protests < > In Romania, where the Party would not budge, a rebellious army seized and executed the Communist dictator and his wife. But the revolutions elsewhere were described by both local and Western press as "velvet.""
"Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself, and had no native language to describe and define what had happened."
"..Yeltsin might have appeared to be tackling the pillars of the totalitarian system, its machines of ideology and terror. < > By the end of 1991, Yeltsin had a country to run. But even with the former institutions of the Soviet state under his control, he faced a dire deficit of instruments of governance, and of people to use them."
"When Mikhail Gorbachev, as Party leader, looked at some of the secret archives for the first time in the 1980s, he felt shock, disgust, and disbelief - not only because of what had been done but because it had been done by his own Party and in its name."
"On January 2, 1992, the government lifted price controls on consumer goods, with the exception of bread, milk, and alcohol. < > Within a month, prices had gone up 352 percent..."
"Yeltsin no longer had the strength, or the popular support, to continue fighting the Communist Party. < > With resentment the dominant emotion in the land, Yeltsin could afford no public confrontation with the past."
The author's sources, as well as the author herself, perhaps, seem to become more removed from government actions during the leadership of Vladimir Putin. She writes about a "Nation Divided" and the assassination of Boris Nemtsov on February 27, 2015, who was the father of one of her sources, besides being a very important politician, who became a leader of anti-government demonstrations.
"So this was how it worked. The famous got a bullet in the heart and the less famous got poison in their tea."
Thursday, February 14, 2019
Saturday, February 9, 2019
Experimental Blog # 228
Quotations from "Red Famine" - Stalin's War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum
"The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state."
"On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had "no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry," as a recent biographer has written."
"In just a few short months during the winter of 1929-30 the Soviet state carried out a second revolution in the countryside, for many more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself. All across the USSR, local leaders, successful farmers, priests and village elders were deposed, expropriated, arrested or deported. Entire village populations were forced to give up their land, their livestock, and sometimes their homes in order to join collective farms. Churches were destroyed, icons smashed and bells broken."
"The Ukrainian famine reached its height in the spring of 1933. < > "Excess deaths" continued throughout the rest of 1933 and 1934". < > agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, < > and 0.6 million lost births < > These figures include all victims, wherever they died - by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages - and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards."
"In his momentous "secret speech" in 1956, Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, attacked the "cult of personality" that had surrounded the Soviet dictator and denounced Stalin for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people < > But Khrushchev, who had taken over the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1939, kept silent about both the famine and collectivization."
"Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934 < > were not caused by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people's homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbors died of hunger."
The author, Anne Applebaum, "lives in Poland with her husband, < > a Polish politician, and their two children" This is from the book jacket.
"The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state."
"On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had "no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry," as a recent biographer has written."
"In just a few short months during the winter of 1929-30 the Soviet state carried out a second revolution in the countryside, for many more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself. All across the USSR, local leaders, successful farmers, priests and village elders were deposed, expropriated, arrested or deported. Entire village populations were forced to give up their land, their livestock, and sometimes their homes in order to join collective farms. Churches were destroyed, icons smashed and bells broken."
"The Ukrainian famine reached its height in the spring of 1933. < > "Excess deaths" continued throughout the rest of 1933 and 1934". < > agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, < > and 0.6 million lost births < > These figures include all victims, wherever they died - by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages - and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards."
"In his momentous "secret speech" in 1956, Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, attacked the "cult of personality" that had surrounded the Soviet dictator and denounced Stalin for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people < > But Khrushchev, who had taken over the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1939, kept silent about both the famine and collectivization."
"Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934 < > were not caused by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people's homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbors died of hunger."
The author, Anne Applebaum, "lives in Poland with her husband, < > a Polish politician, and their two children" This is from the book jacket.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Experimental Blog # 227
Comments on "Stalin's Daughter - The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva" by Rosemary Sullivan
This book has about 632 pages of text plus about an additional 124 pages of family trees, preface, acknowledgements, list of characters{there are as many as 117}, sources, notes, bibliography, illustration credits, and index.
Besides that, roughly the first 190 pages contain a great deal of information about Joseph Stalin in the years leading up to his death in 1953. More information about the Bolsheviks and the soviet government continues for another 80, or more, pages until Svetlana Alliluyeva defects to America at the American embassy in India in 1967.
The author, Rosemary Sullivan, obviously has done an enormous amount of research and work, but her North American point of view, with its peculiarities, shows through nonetheless.
Is it fair to also point out that Rosemary Sullivan apparently did not think about writing a biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva until long after Svetlana's four books were published in 1967, 1969, 1984, and 1991; and after she had died in 2011?
This book has about 632 pages of text plus about an additional 124 pages of family trees, preface, acknowledgements, list of characters{there are as many as 117}, sources, notes, bibliography, illustration credits, and index.
Besides that, roughly the first 190 pages contain a great deal of information about Joseph Stalin in the years leading up to his death in 1953. More information about the Bolsheviks and the soviet government continues for another 80, or more, pages until Svetlana Alliluyeva defects to America at the American embassy in India in 1967.
The author, Rosemary Sullivan, obviously has done an enormous amount of research and work, but her North American point of view, with its peculiarities, shows through nonetheless.
Is it fair to also point out that Rosemary Sullivan apparently did not think about writing a biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva until long after Svetlana's four books were published in 1967, 1969, 1984, and 1991; and after she had died in 2011?
Sunday, August 12, 2018
Experimental Blog # 226
Comments on "A Book for Granddaughters - Travelling to the Homeland" by Svetlana Alliluyeva
It turns out that the book "The Faraway Music", mentioned in the last blog # 225, was not Svetlana Alliluyeva's last published book. Her fourth and last published book, apparently, is this one, "A Book for Granddaughters - Travelling to the Homeland"; which was written in 1988 in Wisconsin.
It is mostly about her return to the USSR from England in October of 1984 with her American daughter Olga, who was about 13 years old. It is also true that they had gone to England, and not to Switzerland, which Svetlana preferred, not because Olga was not accepted in school there, but because Svetlana, herself, could not be a permanent resident in Switzerland.
Svetlana's decision to return to the USSR was provoked by telephone conversations with her son that were unexpectedly resumed from England in 1982.
Although Svetlana apparently happily, more or less, met other relatives and friends in Moscow, after an absence of 17 years, her hopes of reconnecting with her son and daughter, Katya, were not fulfilled; so Svetlana and her daughter, Olga, soon leave for Tbilisi, Georgia on December 1, 1984.
In Tbilisi matters go much better, especially for Olga, who easily makes friends and learns both Russian and Georgian fairly well in a year's time.
By December of 1985, however, Svetlana has decided that since she has been unable to reestablish friendly relations with her Russian son and daughter, who lives and is a scientific worker in Kamchatka, she wants to leave the USSR, again.
After travelling from Tbilisi to Moscow, and back again; and experiencing many difficulties, including very serious, and mysterious, health problems, they are allowed to leave on separate days and to separate destinations. In the spring of 1986 Olga goes first back to her school in England, and Svetlana, with Olga's dog, Maka, returns to the USA in Wisconsin.
Svetlana has written this book in 1988 in familiar surroundings in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
It seems that Svetlana Alliluyeva had been discouraged from writing any more books. When she finished writing this book she was around 62 years of age; but she will live for another 23 years to be 85 in different places in England and Wisconsin; and perhaps visiting other places as well.
It turns out that the book "The Faraway Music", mentioned in the last blog # 225, was not Svetlana Alliluyeva's last published book. Her fourth and last published book, apparently, is this one, "A Book for Granddaughters - Travelling to the Homeland"; which was written in 1988 in Wisconsin.
It is mostly about her return to the USSR from England in October of 1984 with her American daughter Olga, who was about 13 years old. It is also true that they had gone to England, and not to Switzerland, which Svetlana preferred, not because Olga was not accepted in school there, but because Svetlana, herself, could not be a permanent resident in Switzerland.
Svetlana's decision to return to the USSR was provoked by telephone conversations with her son that were unexpectedly resumed from England in 1982.
Although Svetlana apparently happily, more or less, met other relatives and friends in Moscow, after an absence of 17 years, her hopes of reconnecting with her son and daughter, Katya, were not fulfilled; so Svetlana and her daughter, Olga, soon leave for Tbilisi, Georgia on December 1, 1984.
In Tbilisi matters go much better, especially for Olga, who easily makes friends and learns both Russian and Georgian fairly well in a year's time.
By December of 1985, however, Svetlana has decided that since she has been unable to reestablish friendly relations with her Russian son and daughter, who lives and is a scientific worker in Kamchatka, she wants to leave the USSR, again.
After travelling from Tbilisi to Moscow, and back again; and experiencing many difficulties, including very serious, and mysterious, health problems, they are allowed to leave on separate days and to separate destinations. In the spring of 1986 Olga goes first back to her school in England, and Svetlana, with Olga's dog, Maka, returns to the USA in Wisconsin.
Svetlana has written this book in 1988 in familiar surroundings in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
It seems that Svetlana Alliluyeva had been discouraged from writing any more books. When she finished writing this book she was around 62 years of age; but she will live for another 23 years to be 85 in different places in England and Wisconsin; and perhaps visiting other places as well.
Sunday, July 22, 2018
Experimental Blog # 225
Notes and comments on and quotations from "Twenty Letters to a Friend" by Svetlana Alliluyeva, translated by Priscilla Johnson McMillan; "Only One Year" by Svetlana Alliluyeva, translated from the Russian by Paul Chavchavadze; and "The Faraway Music" by Svetlana Alliluyeva, author and translator.
The first book, "Twenty Letters to a Friend", was written by the author in the summer of 1963, about 10 years and 4 months after the death of her father, Joseph Stalin. At the time Svetlana had no ideas about publishing her manuscript as a book, or ever leaving the Soviet Union.
Svetlana left the USSR on December 19, 1966 to go to India with her late husbands ashes. She, and everybody else, expected that she would return in a month, or so; but she managed to extend her stay in India to March 1967. At that time Svetlana wanted to stay in India permanently, "forever", she says; but the government of India was afraid to let her do that, so Svetlana felt that she had no alterantive but to ask for help at the American embassy. After secret detours of a month, or so, she arrived in America in the middle of the international sensation that her defection, "the daughter of Stalin", had created.
During this time Svetlana had signed several documents that she very poorly understood that resulted in that she was completely deprived of any interference, or any other rights, over her manuscript, including the translation into English. Although her book became an international best seller, it produced many unpleasant and persistent "boomerang" effects for her.
Svetlana's second book, "Only One Year", was written within 2 years after her arrival in America; and this time she made very sure that she kept possession of the copyright, and she also approved of the translator.
The third book, "The Faraway Music", was written about 14 years later, in 1983, in Cambridge, England; where Svetlana had gone to live and to put her American daughter into a private school. Somewhat surprisingly, Svetlana wrote this book herself first in English.
It seems that soon after Svetlana wrote this third book, she and her daughter actually went back to the Soviet Union, where they restored Soviet citizenship to her, However, things did not work out for her, and her daughter, there either, and she was allowed to leave again after staying less than 2 years. She never says a word about this long trip.
In 1987 Svetlana herself translated her third, and apparently her last book, "The Faraway Music", into Russian.
Quotations from "Only One Year":
"...although I lived "at the top of the pyramid," < > my whole life, like that of the entire nation, became divided into two periods: before 1953 and after."
" ...in my early years, Communism was an unshakable stronghold. Unshakable remained my father's authority and the belief that he was right in everything without exception."
"Sometimes my father would suddenly say to me, "Why do you associate with children whose parents have been arrested?"
"In September 1957 I changed my name from "Stalina" to "Alliluyeva" - under Soviet law children could bear either their father's or their mother's name."
"My first impression of America was of the magnificent Long Island highways. < > The second thing I noticed < > was the number of women driving cars. < > it was the variety of feminine types at the wheel that struck me: pretty young girls, < > many Negroes, young and old; women in furs and extraordinary big hats ..."
Other sources say that Joseph Stalin was always reading, up to 400 pages a day. Although Svetlana relates an incident where Joseph Stalin is showing somebody his library and he says something like that although he is 70 years old; he is still learning.
""My father made up for his poor education only in the field of technical knowledge."
"He had a certain acquaintance with languages, dating back to his seminary days when he had studied Latin and Greek. He could read Georgian < > He knew Russian well in its simpler, conversational form < > With the help of a dictionary he could make out a simple German text."
Svetlana very distinctly complained about the translation of her first book, "Twenty Letters to a Friend", that was translated by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. However, a very amatuer comparison of the English and Russian editions of this book reveals that, although this English translation is not a very literal translation that some people prefer, it always seems that the translator was trying to say the same thing in American English that the original text says in Russian. Perhaps the translator was in a hurry to "get the job done", for some reason.
Svetlana also repeatedly makes it very clear that she has a very low opinion of all public schools; no matter that they are in America or the Soviet Union or anywhere else.That was why she moved to England. She seemed to think that Switzerland, where her daughter could not be accepted, and then England had the best private schools.
However, wouldn't many people say that no country, including America, can really be better than its public schools?
The first book, "Twenty Letters to a Friend", was written by the author in the summer of 1963, about 10 years and 4 months after the death of her father, Joseph Stalin. At the time Svetlana had no ideas about publishing her manuscript as a book, or ever leaving the Soviet Union.
Svetlana left the USSR on December 19, 1966 to go to India with her late husbands ashes. She, and everybody else, expected that she would return in a month, or so; but she managed to extend her stay in India to March 1967. At that time Svetlana wanted to stay in India permanently, "forever", she says; but the government of India was afraid to let her do that, so Svetlana felt that she had no alterantive but to ask for help at the American embassy. After secret detours of a month, or so, she arrived in America in the middle of the international sensation that her defection, "the daughter of Stalin", had created.
During this time Svetlana had signed several documents that she very poorly understood that resulted in that she was completely deprived of any interference, or any other rights, over her manuscript, including the translation into English. Although her book became an international best seller, it produced many unpleasant and persistent "boomerang" effects for her.
Svetlana's second book, "Only One Year", was written within 2 years after her arrival in America; and this time she made very sure that she kept possession of the copyright, and she also approved of the translator.
The third book, "The Faraway Music", was written about 14 years later, in 1983, in Cambridge, England; where Svetlana had gone to live and to put her American daughter into a private school. Somewhat surprisingly, Svetlana wrote this book herself first in English.
It seems that soon after Svetlana wrote this third book, she and her daughter actually went back to the Soviet Union, where they restored Soviet citizenship to her, However, things did not work out for her, and her daughter, there either, and she was allowed to leave again after staying less than 2 years. She never says a word about this long trip.
In 1987 Svetlana herself translated her third, and apparently her last book, "The Faraway Music", into Russian.
Quotations from "Only One Year":
"...although I lived "at the top of the pyramid," < > my whole life, like that of the entire nation, became divided into two periods: before 1953 and after."
" ...in my early years, Communism was an unshakable stronghold. Unshakable remained my father's authority and the belief that he was right in everything without exception."
"Sometimes my father would suddenly say to me, "Why do you associate with children whose parents have been arrested?"
"In September 1957 I changed my name from "Stalina" to "Alliluyeva" - under Soviet law children could bear either their father's or their mother's name."
"My first impression of America was of the magnificent Long Island highways. < > The second thing I noticed < > was the number of women driving cars. < > it was the variety of feminine types at the wheel that struck me: pretty young girls, < > many Negroes, young and old; women in furs and extraordinary big hats ..."
Other sources say that Joseph Stalin was always reading, up to 400 pages a day. Although Svetlana relates an incident where Joseph Stalin is showing somebody his library and he says something like that although he is 70 years old; he is still learning.
""My father made up for his poor education only in the field of technical knowledge."
"He had a certain acquaintance with languages, dating back to his seminary days when he had studied Latin and Greek. He could read Georgian < > He knew Russian well in its simpler, conversational form < > With the help of a dictionary he could make out a simple German text."
Svetlana very distinctly complained about the translation of her first book, "Twenty Letters to a Friend", that was translated by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. However, a very amatuer comparison of the English and Russian editions of this book reveals that, although this English translation is not a very literal translation that some people prefer, it always seems that the translator was trying to say the same thing in American English that the original text says in Russian. Perhaps the translator was in a hurry to "get the job done", for some reason.
Svetlana also repeatedly makes it very clear that she has a very low opinion of all public schools; no matter that they are in America or the Soviet Union or anywhere else.That was why she moved to England. She seemed to think that Switzerland, where her daughter could not be accepted, and then England had the best private schools.
However, wouldn't many people say that no country, including America, can really be better than its public schools?
Sunday, February 25, 2018
Experimental Blog # 224
Quotations from and comments on "Political Tribes" - Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations by Amy Chua
"Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. < > Almost no one is a hermit. Even monks and friars belong to orders. But the tribal instinct is not just an instinct to belong. It is also an instinct to exclude. < > once people belong to a group, their identities can become oddly bound with it. < > They will sacrifice, and even kill and die, for their groups."
"In many parts of the world < > the group identities that matter most < > are not national, but ethnic, regional, religious, sectarian, or clan based."
"A striking fact about terrorists is that, unlike serial killers, they are not generally psychopaths. Most serial murderers, experts agree, exhibit traits consistent with diagnosable psychopathic personality disorders. By contrast, psychologists studying terrorism have struggled in vain for years to identify deviant or abnormal personality traits typical of terrorists."
"Indeed, there is now consensus among researchers that "terrorists are essentially normal individuals.""
"Very few people, no matter how angry, impoverished, or degraded, actually engage in terrorist activity. For most of us, it is incomprehensible that seemingly normal, likeable young men and women, often from loving families, could blow themselves up or participate gleefully in gruesome beheadings."
There are very informative and thought provoking chapters{close to one half of this book} specifically devoted to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Terror Tribes, and Venezuela.
The author's American chapters are entitled: "American Exceptionalism and the Sources of U.S. Group Blindness Abroad", "Inequality and the Tribal Chasm in America", and "Democracy and Political Tribalism in America". However, not all of this writing is entirely so informative or thought provoking. For instance, she writes a lot about the much talked about subjects of "race and racism", but not quite so much about the real significance of ancestry and related subjects.
None the less, Amy Chua has very interesting and thought provoking opinions and she expresses them very articulately.
"Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. < > Almost no one is a hermit. Even monks and friars belong to orders. But the tribal instinct is not just an instinct to belong. It is also an instinct to exclude. < > once people belong to a group, their identities can become oddly bound with it. < > They will sacrifice, and even kill and die, for their groups."
"In many parts of the world < > the group identities that matter most < > are not national, but ethnic, regional, religious, sectarian, or clan based."
"A striking fact about terrorists is that, unlike serial killers, they are not generally psychopaths. Most serial murderers, experts agree, exhibit traits consistent with diagnosable psychopathic personality disorders. By contrast, psychologists studying terrorism have struggled in vain for years to identify deviant or abnormal personality traits typical of terrorists."
"Indeed, there is now consensus among researchers that "terrorists are essentially normal individuals.""
"Very few people, no matter how angry, impoverished, or degraded, actually engage in terrorist activity. For most of us, it is incomprehensible that seemingly normal, likeable young men and women, often from loving families, could blow themselves up or participate gleefully in gruesome beheadings."
There are very informative and thought provoking chapters{close to one half of this book} specifically devoted to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Terror Tribes, and Venezuela.
The author's American chapters are entitled: "American Exceptionalism and the Sources of U.S. Group Blindness Abroad", "Inequality and the Tribal Chasm in America", and "Democracy and Political Tribalism in America". However, not all of this writing is entirely so informative or thought provoking. For instance, she writes a lot about the much talked about subjects of "race and racism", but not quite so much about the real significance of ancestry and related subjects.
None the less, Amy Chua has very interesting and thought provoking opinions and she expresses them very articulately.
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Experimental Blog # 223
Comments and notes on "Istanbul" - A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes
This book contains over 600 pages of text and maps. In addition to this there are 29 pages of timeline, 66 pages of notes, 58 pages of bibliography, and 37 pages of index. It is indeed a "colossal undertaking ... a notable achievement."
"Legend has it that{in 657 BC} Byzas from Megara founds Byzantion as a Greek colony on the west side of the Bosphorus."
"Byzantion is renamed Constantinople"{in 330 AD}.
"After the sack of Rome{in 410 AD by Goths led by Alaric} and the collapse of the machine whose constituent parts - the army, tax collectors, loyalty to an idea - had kept the pax Romana operative, the West fractured."
"On 16 July AD 1054 < > Thus began the so-called Great Schism. The impasse would not be resolved until 910 years later in 1964."
A chapter is entitled "The City of Crusades AD 1090 - 1203"; of which there were four.
In 1453 the Ottoman Empire led by Mehmed II conquers Constantinople; which is now also called Kostantiniyye or Islam-bol.
"After the fall of Constantinople in AD 1453 it was Russia which took on the mantle of Orthodoxy."
In AD 1683 occurs the Great Siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed IV; but they are defeated.
"After the Viennese defeat{that is the Ottoman defeat at Vienna} < > The Russians, hearing reports of Ottoman distress, set off from Moscow with a million{!!} horses, 300,000 infantry and 100,000 cavalry." Don't these numbers sound too high to be true?
However, the author's many travels and other descriptions to the places, sites, and museums that she writes about make her book exceptionally interesting and vivid.
This book contains over 600 pages of text and maps. In addition to this there are 29 pages of timeline, 66 pages of notes, 58 pages of bibliography, and 37 pages of index. It is indeed a "colossal undertaking ... a notable achievement."
"Legend has it that{in 657 BC} Byzas from Megara founds Byzantion as a Greek colony on the west side of the Bosphorus."
"Byzantion is renamed Constantinople"{in 330 AD}.
"After the sack of Rome{in 410 AD by Goths led by Alaric} and the collapse of the machine whose constituent parts - the army, tax collectors, loyalty to an idea - had kept the pax Romana operative, the West fractured."
"On 16 July AD 1054 < > Thus began the so-called Great Schism. The impasse would not be resolved until 910 years later in 1964."
A chapter is entitled "The City of Crusades AD 1090 - 1203"; of which there were four.
In 1453 the Ottoman Empire led by Mehmed II conquers Constantinople; which is now also called Kostantiniyye or Islam-bol.
"After the fall of Constantinople in AD 1453 it was Russia which took on the mantle of Orthodoxy."
In AD 1683 occurs the Great Siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed IV; but they are defeated.
"After the Viennese defeat{that is the Ottoman defeat at Vienna} < > The Russians, hearing reports of Ottoman distress, set off from Moscow with a million{!!} horses, 300,000 infantry and 100,000 cavalry." Don't these numbers sound too high to be true?
However, the author's many travels and other descriptions to the places, sites, and museums that she writes about make her book exceptionally interesting and vivid.
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