Tatarstan - The Other Russia

Flag of Tatarstan

It took a while after the break-up of the Soviet Union in the late 80's for 'the Stans' to secure a solid place in the mental geography of people outside the Soviet world and, when I moved to Uzbekistan in 2001, most people had never heard of it. 

All that changed after September 11 and now people will have a vague awareness of the existence of countries like Uzbekistan, Kazakstan and Turkmenistan, countries that were, for so long, hidden behind the name 'Soviet Union'. 

Nowadays, the Russian Federation still hides a lot of smaller 'countries' within its borders and the Republic of Tatarstan is one of the most prominent entities of this Federation - nominally independent, it's still very much part of Russia, although many non-Russians won't even know that it exists. 

Ever since I lived in Russia, I've been quite fascinated by its 'Federal subjects' and Tatarstan is just one of the Russian Federation's 22 republics! It's very much 'the other Russia' - Muslim, historically a rival power to Moscow and, in recent years, one of the wealthier parts of the country. 

Kazan Kremlin by Mikhail Koninin

Although other republics like Chechnya and Ingushetia have captured the news headlines in recent years, I think if Tatarstan really became independent from Russia, it would be the beginning of the end for the Russian Federation. Having said that, Tatarstan's population is tiny compared to the rest of Russia (less than 4 million) and Moscow is careful to keep the power of the Federation flowing centrally, so regional capitals, like Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, remain relatively unimportant backwaters. 

I also come from a European republic (Ireland) that is part of a federation (the European Union), but it would be a mistake to think of republics in the Russian federation in the same way and being nominally independent doesn't give Tatarstan a place at the world table of nations, nor does it mean that Tatarstan is seen as a nation globally. In terms of Tatarstan's place in the world, it's very much part of a strong and unified Russian state. 

Perhaps this explains why I'm already struggling to get a sense of the culture of Tatarstan and whether it's through books, movies or music, it seems as though all roads lead back to Moscow. As with many of the nations within Russia, Tatarstan has an officially sanctioned culture, but it's not at all globalised and I would need to be a Turkic language specialist to engage with the cultural outputs that are sanctioned by the Russian state. 

Kazan shop front by Nat Urazmetova

I'm not saying that Russia wilfully blocks access to the cultural achievements of Tatarstan, rather that anyone producing music, literature or movies in Tatarstan will need to go through Russian culture first, before it can reach a global audience. I think this is the sacrifice of belonging to a Federation and it seems as though Tatarstan doesn't have its own 'cultural conversation' with our globalised world. 

I'm deliberately talking about the 'culture of Tatarstan' here, rather than Tatar culture. Tatar culture is a more complicated thing, as there are Tatars all over Russia and Central Asia, including the well-known Tatar minority in Crimea. In my blog posts, I want to concentrate on issues, culture and people who are somehow connected to Tatarstan, whether or not they are also connected to Tatar culture. 

Interestingly, most artists, musicians etc that I have been able to find are only half-Tatar and I think that says a lot about a modern Tatarstan that has found its place in the world as a partner in the shadow of Russian culture. That's why I've called Tatarstan 'the other Russia' and I'm intrigued by the influence of Tatar culture on mainstream Russian culture - I believe that, whether people recognise it or not, cultural imperialism can flow both ways.  Perhaps Tatarstan represents another side of Russian culture, which is Asian, Islamic and multicultural, whereas many people see Russia as European, Christian and monocultural. 

I've started my research by reading Daniel Kalder's book The Lost Cosmonaut (2007), an anti-tourist's account of his travels to Tatarstan, Kalmykia, Mari-El and Udmurtia. I think Kalder does Tatarstan an injustice in his description - I travelled to Kazan in 2007 and it's a more interesting place than he makes it out to be. 

Something I learned from Kalder's book though was that Kazan became very famous in the 1970's because of its gangs! Gangs were something that were pretty much unheard of during Soviet times and they were a social problem usually associated with the cities of the capitalist West, so Kazan's gangs brought turmoil to the otherwise compliant Soviet nation.

Kazan market by Nat Urazmetova

Interestingly, these gangs became the building blocks of the corrupt form of capitalism that Russia has inherited from the Soviet Union and it was my first real piece of evidence regarding Tatarstan's influence on Russia as a whole. 

Tatarstan is situated at the heart of the Volga region and is, therefore, quite a suitable second choice in terms of my Learning about Russia. I first blogged about Russia (Urals Federal District) in 2010/11 and you can see an overview of the topics I covered on my final blog post about the Urals. I also quite sneakily referenced Kazan a couple of months ago, when I was blogging about the Solomon Islands, as Kazan was the host city for this year's FINA World Championships.

I look forward to learning more about Tatarstan and Russia over the coming weeks and I hope you'll join me on my virtual learning journey.

Image credits:

The image of Kazan kremlin is by Flickr member, Mikhail Koninin.  Mikhail is from Novosibirsk and you can see more of his images on his photostream.

The images of the Kazan shop front and Kazan market are by Flickr member Nat Urazmetova, who is originally from Ufa in Bashkortostan, but now lives in London.

Thanks to Nat and Mikhail for sharing these images with us, using the Creative Commons license.  

Urals Federal District - До свидания, ребята, до скорой встречи!

So, my time blogging about the Urals has come to an end.  As usual, I've learned a lot more than I've had time to blog about and I've touched on themes that I haven't had time to explore further.  As is tradition, in my final blogpost about the Urals, I'm going to summarise some of the other things I learned during my research into this region of Russia.

I learned about the American spy, Gary Powers, whose plane was shot down over the Urals in the 1960's.  I learned about Uralmash, the heavy machinery factory in Ekaterinburg and about the Cossack motorcycles, which the Urals region is famous for, manufactured in Irbit, Sverdlovsk Oblast.  I learned that part of the Hermitage's collection of Art was evacuated to Ekaterinburg in July 1941 and that an estimated 25,000 people were killed in Ekaterinburg during Stalin's rule.

I learned that the Ural mountains are actually quite low-lying, never rising above 2,000 metres.  I learned that Catherine is the patron saint of miners and that Chelyabinsk was nicknamed 'tank city'.

I learned that the famous bard, Okudzhava, was born in Nizhny Tagil.  I also learned that Nizhny Tagil has several maximum security prisons and that, on release from prison, prisoners aren't given an onward ticket, so they often settle in the town.  I learned that a mass grave was found in Nizhny Tagil in 2007, containing the bodies of some 30 local women who'd been forced into prostitution by local gang members.

I learned about Siberian orange snow.  I learned that Tyumen, the capital of villages, was the birthplace of the famous American composer, Irving Berlin and that one of Tyumen's main streets is named in honor of Maurice Thorez, who was leader of the French Communist Party for a good part of the 20th century.


Tobolsk by Clurross


I learned that Tobolsk used to be the capital of the whole of Siberia and was the first town to be settled in the 'wild east'.  I learned that Khanty-Mansiisk, capital of the Khanty-Mansi Autnomous Okrug, has become something of a boom town in recent years and that Norman Foster has been commissioned to design a skyscraper for the city. 

I learned that Salekhard, the capital of Yamalia, means 'house on the peninsula' and is the only town in the world that is situated right on the Arctic circle.  I learned that Surgut, the oil capital of Russia, means 'fish hole' in Khanty language and that the two biggest cities in Yamalia were only founded in the 70's - Novy Urengoy (1975) and Noyabrsk (1977). 

During the time I've been blogging about the Urals Federal District, news from Russia has, perhaps somewhat predictably, been mostly about spies and aviation accidents, with media speculation in December about the Russian aide to LidDem's MP for Portsmouth South, Mike Hancock, as well as the news of Kolavia flight 348 bursting into flames at Surgut airport on the 1st of January 2011.  On board the plane were members of the Russian 'boyband' Na-Na. 

I also had the opportunity to catch up on some Russian movies that I hadn't seen before, mainly Brat and Brat 2, both directed by Sverdlovsk-born Aleksei Balabanov.  The movies are classically Russian, telling the story of a gormless, but likeable ex-soldier and his attempts to establish some kind of justice in the criminal underworlds of post-communist Petersburg and Moscow.  In the second movie, the plot moves to America and it's interesting to see 'land of hope and glory' through Russian eyes.  I found Brat 2 to be more than a little bit racist, but I understand the way Russians see the world and how their intentions can be misunderstood by a culture (the West) which is incredibly different to theirs.

I really enjoyed both movies, as they capture the innocence of Russia's interaction with the late-20th century capitalist world, but they're also realistic about the dangers of criminal gangs and the sense of isolation felt by many Russians in the new society they suddenly find themselves in.  Sadly, the main actor in Brat and Brat 2, Sergei Bodrov Junior, was killed in a landslide whilst filming in the Caucasus in September 2002.  I'm going to leave you with the trailer for the original movie, to give you a taster of what the movie is like. 

Next up:  V for . . .
Image credits:

The image of Tobolsk is by flickuser clurross who is a Glasgow native.  See more of her images on her photostream.  Thanks to clurross for sharing this image with us, using the Creative Commons License. 

Urals Federal District - was Rasputin bi-curious?

So much has been written about Rasputin and his murder that it's hard to find a new angle on the events surrounding his life and death. In his book, The Murder of Rasputin Greg King focuses on Rasputin's most famous assassin, Prince Felix Youssoupov and speculates on the nature of their relationship, adding a new theory that Rasputin and Felix Youssoupov may have had a physical relationship of some kind.


Greg King has written several books about the Romanovs and seems to have a fascination with the shadier or more eccentric royals, also having written about Ludwig II of Bavaria and Wallis Simpson, the divorcee from Pennsylvania who married Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. He's certainly found an interesting subject in the Youssoupovs and, although I'd known a bit about Rasputin before I started researching for this blog, I'd never heard of Felix Youssoupov and his involvement in Rasputin's murder.

The mad monk from Siberia

Grigori Rasputin was born into a peasant family in a small village called Pokrovskoye in Tyumen region, which is now part of the Urals Federal District. In one of those strange ironies of Rasputin's life and death, the Romanov family were also killed in the Urals, just outside Ekaterinburg, fulfilling a prophecy he'd made that they would pass through his village of birth before they died. If Rasputin were alive today, he would, no doubt, have his own cult, like the modern-day Vissarion, ex-policeman turned Messiah, who heads up the Church of the Last Testament in Sun City near the Siberian town of Minusinsk.

As Rasputin discovered religion and his newfound role of prophet, he was influenced by fringe sects in the Orthodox Church, such as the Skopsty, who believed that man could, through prayer, become equal to God and the masochistic Khlysty who believed in spiritual enlightment through humiliation of the flesh, by whipping (the Russian for whip is хлыст khlyst) or through sexual humiliation in group orgies.

Rasputin is probably most (in)famous for his immense sexual appetite (and, by all accounts, the size of his 'talent'!). I suspect that his involvement with the Khlysty sect was a way of reconciling his genuine religious fervour, with the carnal desires that he found so hard to control. Something I didn't know about Rasputin was that he claimed that the Virgin Mary had appeared to him in a vision and instructed him to walk to the Orthodox Holy Land of Mount Athos in Greece, which he did, a distance of about 2,400 miles!

Although Rasputin's name is believed to have been a genuine birth name, it's interesting that the word распутье rasputye means 'a fork in the road' - also распущенность raspuschenost' from the same root, is the Russian word for 'debauchery'.

Rasputin and the Romanovs

Rasputin must have known that he'd hit the big time, when he found himself being invited to the Russian Imperial Court in St Petersburg, using his spiritual powers to heal the ailing son of the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II. After the trauma of Catherine the Great, her son Pavel I changed the succession rules of the Russian Tsars, which meant that only male offspring could claim the throne of Russia. Although Nicholas and his German-born Tsarina, Alexandra, had had four daughters, their fifth child, Alexei was their only son and heir to the Russian throne. Not widely publicised at the time was the fact that Alexei had hemophilia, a hereditary disease that is passed through the maternal line, in this case from his mother and grand-mother, Queen Victoria.

As a result of his illness and the fact that he was the only one of their children who could inherit the throne, the Tsar and Tsarina became obsessive about Alexei's health. The fact that Rasputin seemed to have the ability to control Alexei's bleeding secured his place at the centre of the royal household and led to the situation where a Siberian peasant appeared to have so much influence over the Tsarina, to the point where the Tsarina's enemies accused her of letting him make political decisions that were detrimental to Russia's involvement in the First World War. Greg King's position on this, in his book, is that Rasputin's influence on the government of Russia was widely exaggerated and that the real 'issue' with the government of Russia during the First World War was that Nicholas II was a weak ruler and left too many important decisions to the caprices of his wife.

Enter Prince Youssoupov

The Youssoupov family were wealthy beyond belief in the pre-Revolution period. Of Tatar origin, they had their traditional home in Crimea and through centuries of tussles with the ruling Russian dynasties, they eventually converted from Islam to Christianity and threw their lot in with the Russian state. Although they were incredibly wealthy and part of the aristocracy, the Youssoupovs weren't royals and would not be considered eligible to take or marry into the Russian throne.

Felix's mother had wanted a girl and, when he came along, she dressed him as a girl until he was five years old, a common practice in Victorian Europe. She no doubt spoiled him as well, as he grew up to be an impossible child and went through a series of governesses and tutors, none of them being able to tame him. His first governess was discreetly packed off to a mental asylum, after she'd had a nervous breakdown.  A subsequent governess hit the bottle, before being dismissed from her post!



F Youssoupov by Vladimir Surov


He certainly had an interesting life, perhaps typical of rich young men, with nothing else to worry about apart from their own pleasure! He liked to cross-dress and didn't hide his relationships with men. He was known for his extravagence and his love of parties, but he also attempted to change his life, by studying at Oxford and marrying a Romanov princess, Irina - a marriage that would span decades until his death in 1967. How Felix got caught up in the assassination of Rasputin is still a mystery to me, despite King's attempts to explain. I can only assume that he was impulsive and that he somehow felt the need to redeem himself in the eyes of the Russian public, by murdering the person that was deemed to be Public Enemy number one.

The murder of Rasputin

Felix always said that he wanted to be remembered for something more than the murder of Rasputin, but that's hardly been the case. As one of the few eye-witnesses to the event, his account of the murder has entered modern folklore as fact. The most famous aspect of Rasputin's murder was that, despite being poisoned, shot and bludgeoned until he lost consciousness - he still somehow managed to stay alive and is only believed to have died when Youssoupov and his co-conspirators dumped his body into the icy River Neva, thereby drowning him. An autopsy showed water in Rasputin's lungs, which meant he was still breathing when they threw him in the river, but it's interesting to note that death by drowning meant Rasputin would never be canonised as, according to the Russian Orthodox tradition, a true saint could never die by drowning. I wonder how much of Youssoupov's account of Rasputin's death was made up? As King says, in his book, we'll probably never really know the truth.

Were Rasputin and Felix Youssoupov lovers?

So much of Rasputin's reputation was bound up in his pursuit of women, that it's hard to imagine him having an interest in men. Nevertheless, King points to some interesting evidence that Prince Youssoupov and Rasputin were closer than people believed. How else did Felix manage to convince Rasputin to come to his palace on the night of the murder? Perhaps it somehow explains part of Youssoupovs fascination with Rasputin and his motivation for killing him? Rasputin's daughter, Maria, certainly claims that Youssoupov tried to seduce her father, by appearing naked on a visit to him. My instinct tells me that there was nothing really physical between them. I think Felix had plenty of other, younger and more attractive, men at his beck and call. Plus, Rasputin just doesn't seem the type - my gaydar is deathly silent.

Felix Youssoupov has gone down in history as Rasputin's murderer and the notoriety that went with that, despite all of his protests of being something more than a murderer, ensured that Felix would remain in the spotlight for years to come.

The revolution and after

Rasputin's claim that, after his murder, the Romanovs would be dead within six months, proved eerily accurate. A series of revolutions came to St Petersburg, resulting in the Tsar's abdication and, in July 1918, the murder of the Tsar's family in Ekaterinburg. The Youssoupovs fled to Crimea and later Europe, settling in Paris, like many of the former Russian aristocracy and managing to spend excessive amounts of money, leaving themselves on the verge of financial ruin.

Felix went on to write a book about his involvement in Rasputin's death and he and his wife successfully sued MGM when they brought out a film version of the events, Rasputin and the Empress in 1932. As the only living survivors of those depicted in the film, Irina and Felix were able to claim damages for invasion of their privacy and libel. The case hung around a claim the film had made, which said it would depict persons who were still alive. Whenever you see the disclaimer on movies that says this movie is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental, this is as a direct result of the Youssoupovs court case.

I'm going to leave you with the Boney-M song, Rasputin, one of my favourite retellings of the Rasputin murder!
Image credits:

The photo of the book cover was taken by me and is a first Arrow edition, published in 1997.  The image on the book cover is from the author's private photo collection and I'm using this to illustrate my blog and promote his book. 

The portrait of Felix Youssoupov is by the famous Russian painter, Valentin Serov and now hangs in the Russia Museum in St Petersburg. It is in the public domain.

There is an amazing image of Prince Youssoupov dressed up for a costume ball in the Albert Hall, which I can't share with you, as it's copyrighted, but if you can find this picture on the Internet, it's well worth a look, to see the confidence and glamour of Prince Youssoupov in his younger days.

Urals Federal District - an Introduction to the Uralic Languages

I've long had a fascination with the Uralic languages.  Having studied Linguistics at university, I already had an idea of what these languages are and (more or less) where they are spoken.  This blogpost is meant as an introduction to the Uralic languages for those of you who have no idea of what they are and where they are spoken, but it's also an opportunity for me to refresh my memory and learn a little bit more about these languages, especially about their fate in the 21st century.

So where are they spoken?

It's no coincidence that I'm writing these blogs as part of my research into the Urals - I've already mentioned the Khanty-Mansi people in my overview of the Urals Federal district, but the Uralic languages are spoken by more than 20 million people and extend way beyond the Urals region, north and east into Siberia, west into the Volga region and into Eastern Europe, where the major Uralic languages of Finnish, Saami, Estonian and Hungarian can be found. 

It's still not really known with any certainty where the Uralic languages originated - the generally accepted theory is to the west of the Urals, in the Volga region - other theories, include, Siberia, the Baltic region, even eastern Poland has been posited as a possible homeland for the speakers of these languages. What's certain is that the languages exist on both sides of the Urals, so Uralic has been adopted as a kind of compromise term.

Further sub-divisions

What I didn't really realise, prior to doing some research into the Uralic languages is that they are further sub-divided in a way that roughly divides them up into:

- languages closely related to Finnish, Saami and Estonian
- languages closely related to Hungarian
- languages that are distinct from both of these

The languages related to Finnish, Saami and Estonian are the ones in the Volga region (Mordvin, Komi, Udmurt, Mari).  The ones closest to Hungarian are the Urals languages (Khanty and Mansi).  The languages that are distinct from both of these are those of the far north, eg Nenets and Selkup and are still known by the offensive term of Samoyedic languages, from the Russian самоед (samo-yed) which literally means 'self-eater' or cannibal! 

This reminds me of when I was blogging about Togo and Greenland and came across the origin of the term Eskimo which is from the Algonquian language and means 'eaters of raw flesh'.  The term has gone out of use, rightfully so, and so should the term Samoyedic - an alternative, Samodeic has been suggested by concerned ethnologists, but it would probably be even better to have a term derived from one of the languages concerned. 

Linguistic diversity in Russia

Again, it might surprise people to know that there is a real diversity of languages spoken in Russia, very few of them being Indo-European (Russian and Ossetian being the other most-referenced Indo-European languages, although I can't help thinking of all the ethnic Ukrainians, Germans etc. that live in Russia).  Apart from the Uralic languages, there are millions of speakers of other non-Indo-European language families, such as Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic), Caucasian languages and even Paleo-Asiatic languages, which bridge the linguistic spectrum from Russia into Alaska and Canada.  Of course, Russian is the lingua franca and spoken by 85% of Russia's population.  Being a champion of lesser used languages, I hate to see the smaller ones disappear and certainly the advent of the Internet age is helping revive and resusicate languages which, otherwise would be dying out.

Wikipedia and the preservation of lesser used languages

I think Wikipedia is a good example of how smaller languages can be given new life.  Being open-source and created by dedicated users, Wikipedia is a perfect platform (not the only one) for those who are interested in keeping a language alive.  As part of my research, I did a quick analysis of the presence of Uralic languages on Wikipedia.  Of course, Finnish has the greatest presence, with over a quarter of a million articles on the Finnish version of Wikipedia.  It's currently the 15th 'biggest' language on Wikipedia and has more articles than, for example, the Turkish and Korean wikipedias.  Finnish is followed by Hungarian (more than 180,000) articles and Estonian (more than 81,000 articles), but many of the 'smaller' Uralic languages also have a presence on Wikipedia.

Another thing I learned about the Uralic languages in Russia is that there is a big difference in numbers between the languages in the Volga region, which have about 2.5 million speakers between them and the languages in the Urals, which have about 12,000 (Khanty) and 3,000 (Mansi) speakers.  It's probably not surprising then, that the languages of the Volga (Mordvin etc.) have their own versions of Wikipedia, whereas Khanty and Mansi don't. 

Language preserved in songs and stories

As is often the way with languages that are dying out, it is the older generation who continue to speak them  on a day-to-day basis and as a native tongue.  I guess if you are a young person who speaks Khanty and you want to seek further opportunities, for example, by finding a job in Moscow, then it's inevitable that you will end up speaking Russian most of the time and lose touch with your native language.  Like my own native language, Irish, there does seem to be something of a revival of languages on the Internet and it's become a lot easier in recent years to communicate in your native language online with people at a distance and also to access native speech and texts through online media.

Another great source of materials is, of course, Youtube and I'm pasting in a little video below posted by nurianbek225 which will let you hear the Khanty language in speech and song.  Any of you who speak Hungarian might be surprised to find similarities between Hungarian and Khanty, whose modern-day speakers live thousands of miles apart!



The structure of Uralic languages and the importance of geography

What's interesting about the Uralic languages from an Indo-European point of view is that they are so different.  If you've ever heard spoken Finnish or Hungarian, I'm sure you'll know what I mean!  What's also interesting is that Hungarian and Khanty can retain so many similarities in vocabulary and grammatical structure, despite the geographical divide and the intervention of centuries of separation, with little contact between speakers. 

In the models of language families currently accepted by Linguists the world over, stemming from the Victorian period and the scientific emphasis on categorising everything, this is proof of fact that language families exist.  However, I'm always interested in looking at things from a different angle and there are a lot of question marks around the categorisation of Uralic languages, in the same way as I suspected a certain amount of 'lazy linguistics' in the categorisation of African languages (see my earlier blogpost). 

Rather than slotting things into a box and leaving it at that, I wonder if it would be worth spending more time exploring the non-Uralic languages that have come into contact with the languages mentioned in this blogpost.  I still have a few question marks, which I'm listing below:

1. Contact with Russian:  Uralic languages are notorious for the number of noun cases they have, including things like lative (to the thing) and locative suffixes (at the thing).  Finnish has no less than 15 cases, including Essive and Marginal cases, which makes it incredibly difficult for non-Uralic speakers to learn.  Of course, Indo-European languages also have cases, but nowhere near as many and they seem to fizzle out the further West you go, with English barely keeping any of them!

Having studied Russian, I'm also aware of the fact that the Russians have chosen to retain a large number of cases.  My question is if Russian and English are both descended from a proto-Indo-European language, why did Russian keep so many cases and English get rid of them?  I wonder if mere historical contact with the Uralic languages influenced the development of Russian.  In the same way, Old English had a lot more noun cases and declinations than modern English does, which has been influenced by contact with French. 

2. Contact with Swedish and Norwegian.  A small point, but the Uralic languages use postpositions, rather than prepositions (ie. home at, rather than at home).  With my very limited knowledge of Scandinavian languages, I've also wondered why they affix the definite article after the noun (eg. hem home, hemmet home-the) rather than before, like in most other Indo-European languages that have articles.  Again, could this be the influence of contact with Finnish and Saami?

3. Contact with Turkic and Mongolian languages.  There are a lot of similarities in the grammatical structure of Uralic and Altaic languages, the most obvious being that the languages are agglutinative, ie. they keep adding syllables to the root of the word, rather than have seperate words, which can then be moved around.  The similarities are so strong tha some Linguists have suggested a link between the Uralic languages and the languages of Mongolia. 

I think the danger with Historical Linguistics is that it puts too much emphasis on lexicon, ie. languages having similar words for things, eg. comparing the numbers 1-10, whereas words are easily borrowed and shift from one language into another.  Think of the vocabulary of your grandparents and the words you most frequently use today.  Would they understand concepts such as google, wiki and twitter?  Yet these words have entered the mainstream of most modern languages very very quickly!

I think it would be better to look at the underlying grammatical structures of language and compare these, as well as using lexicon to describe a languages' relationship to the ones around it.

4. Contact with the South of India.  Something I hadn't heard of before, was the idea that the Uralic languages might bear some similarities to the Dravidian languages of southern Indian, possibly due to earlier geographical proximity or migration! 

To be honest, I find it all fascinating and look forward to doing further research into the Uralic languages at a later date. 

Image credits:

The map of the where Uralic languages are spoken was provided copyright free on Wikimedia, by wikiuser Martintg - Martintg is a prolific contributor to Wikipedia and seems to have somewhat of a specilisation in Estonia and Estonian culture.  You can see more info at his user page. 

The image of the poster written in Estonian was taken by me on my recent trip to Tallinn.  I've providing this copyright free with attribution (especially a link to this blogpost) and share alike. 

Urals Federal District - Biohazard

During my research into the Urals Federal region and Ekaterinburg, I came across a book called Biohazard by Kanatjan Alibekov (or Ken Alibek, as he's now called), a famous Soviet scientist who worked for an agency called Biopreparat, but later defected to the West, writing this book as an exposé.

Biological warfare

Although the Cold War has long ended, I think we're still living in fear of Biological warfare, as much as we ever did.  The use of bioweapons to disable or kill enemy troops and civilian populations goes back to Antiquity - whether it was poisoning the water supply of enemy villages in Ancient Greece, catapulting plague-infected bodies into besieged towns during the Medieval period or giving Native Americans blankets smeared in smallpox in the 17th century, airborne diseases, contagions and viruses have been used during warfare, as far back as the records of war go. 

Alibek exposed the extent to which the Soviet Union, under the guise of a supposedly 'civilian' pharmaceutical agency, developed dangerous weapons using Tularemia, Q fever, Brucellosis (Malta Fever), Glanders and (most controversially) Smallpox.  This was in direct violation of the agreements of the 1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons convention, where the Soviet Union and 136 other countries signed up to a ban on the development or stockpiling of dangerous microbes.  Since the collapse of the Soviet 'Empire' and shift in focus to Iraq and Afghanistan, we've heard a lot about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) - biological weapons are also considered to be a WMD. 

In the age of air travel and frequent contact between people all over the world, I believe that Bioweapons pose an even great threat to humanity than ever.  We've recently seen how viruses such as swine flu and bird flu have spread across the world like wildfire.  The release of dangerous microbes into a population that has no immunisation could cause untold devastation and death.  Viruses don't tend to recognise national borders, so no one really gains, in the end.  Biological weapons are notoriously hard to control, so much so, that many nations are reluctant to develop them in the first place.  Certainly, the weapons developed in the Soviet Union during the period Alibek describes, caused dozens of human deaths, mostly scientists working with the dangerous substances and civilians who happened to work or live in the vicinity of a bioweapons plant - not to mention all the monkeys, rodents and other animals that were exposed to viruses during testing.

Anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk

The reason I came across Alibek's book in the first place, was because I was reading about the outbreak of Anthrax in Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) in 1979.  It's unbelievable, really, that the Soviets would carry out bioweapon manufacture, in the midst of a civilian population.  My experience of Russia is that a human life sometimes doesn't count for much.  Perhaps understandable in a country where millions of people lost their lives fighting the Nazis in the Second World War. 

An estimated 100 people died as a result of leaked Anthrax from Military Compound 19, just outside Ekaterinburg.  Alibek mentions how overworked scientists generally were, therefore it's no surprise that an accident like this one would happen when, during a shift change on a Friday evening, someone overlooked the need to replace an air vent in the building, which lead to Anthrax being sprayed into the atmosphere outside and being carried on the wind towards a neighbouring factory. 

At a time when events like this were covered up by the Soviet authorities, the official story was put out that the workers had died as a result of eating contaminated meat that they'd bought on the black market (conveniently putting the blame on the victims).  No explanation was given for the fact that the majority of those who died were men (as if women and children don't eat meat) and that the deaths continued months after the event.  The outbreak was prolonged by some of the locals who, not knowing that Anthrax had been released from the plant, decided to sweep everything clean, stirring up the microbes again and causing even more deaths.  Sadly, a hundred stray dogs were rounded up and shot dead, in the belief that they had been scavenging on the (fictional) contaminated meat and were somehow responsible for prolonging the outbreak. 

It seems as though the truth about what happened in Sverdlovsk in 1979 is now generally known by people in Russia and one of the rock groups I mentioned in my last blog, Smyslovye Gallyutsinatsii named one of their albums Rus-66, perhaps in tribute to the 66 deaths that were confirmed to be as a result of the Anthrax leak. 

The dangers of Smallpox

What was most frightening about Alibek's books was the fact that the Soviet Union was developing a weapon based on the Smallpox virus.  Smallpox was one of the greatest killer's in the world, a highly infectious disease that causes a very painful death, it was reponsible for the deaths of about 400,000 Europeans every year in the 18th century!  It also wiped out the native populations of the Americas and caused untold devastation among the native Australian population, when European carriers brought the disease to Australia in the 1780's.  As late as the 20th century Smallpox is believed to have caused between 300 and 500 million deaths.

The first ever vaccine for any disease was developed in response to the devastation caused by Smallpox.  In 1796 an English doctor, Edward Jenner from rural Gloucestershire, discovered that milkmaids who had been exposed, through their work, to a less virulent form of pox called 'cowpox', seemed to have immunity from Smallpox.  By taking fluid from the pus in blisters caused by cowpox and injecting these into a young boy, he was able to inoculate the boy and prevent him from falling ill with Smallpox, when he was later exposed to this.  The concept of vaccination is that of injecting a small piece of the virus into your body - not enough (hopefully) to make you seriously ill, but enough to rally your immune system and make your body 'ready' to fight the virus in the early stages of infection.  As I've travelled a lot, I've had quite a few vaccinations in my time!

The word vaccination comes from the Latin for cow, vacca, referring back to Jenner's original experiment.  One of the greatest achievements of modern Science was to completely eradicate the Smallpox virus and the world was free of Smallpox by 1977, the last natural case being recorded in Somalia in that year.  Vaccination against Smallpox had been routine up until that point, despite the fact that it was a little bit dangerous and would result in death in a small number of cases.  During the 1970's most of the world's governments decided to discontinue routine vaccination against Smallpox.  What makes Alibek's research frightening is that Soviet scientists recognised the potential power of harnassing a Smallpox bioweapon, precisely because the population of the late-20th century world no longer had immunisation against the disease. 

Alibek as a man

Alibek's character is a complicated one.  Here is someone who actively turned his knowledge and research to work that could potentially kill millions of people.  One of the main reasons he defected to the West was because he no longer wanted to be involved in the development of biological weapons.  I can kind of understand the way he got sucked into it as a young scientist, eager for a chance to be involved in exciting research and desperate to be promoted and recognised.  Like many of the decisions we make regarding our lives, it's harder to get out of the life you have created for yourself, the longer to continue to live in that way.  Certainly, Alibek rose through the ranks of the Soviet military and held a very powerful position, one of the few Kazakhs to gain that level of authority in the Soviet capital, Moscow. 

When Alibek defected to the West, his knowledge of biological warfare was suddenly very much in demand and he found himself being offered consultancy fees from various different countries.  He preferred to stick to the more positive work of developing vaccines, many of them to counteract the threat of the new viral strains he'd helped create in the 1980's.  Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, biological weapons are still a major threat to human populations.  As a result of the covert development of bioweapons in Soviet Union in the 70's and 80's, there are a lot of Russian scientists with experience in the manufacture of bioweapons, who have been attracted by lucrative contracts working for a range of governments, some of them a direct threat to the populations of Western countries. 

Having said that, an effective biological weapon has never actually been used in a way that caused millions of deaths and (I'm hoping) perhaps, at the end of the day, man won't manage to master nature in this regard. 

Image credits:

The photo of the book cover was taken by me.  I read the version published in 2000 by Arrow Books.

The image of Edward Jenner was taken from wikimedia and is in the public domain.

Urals Federal District - Urals Rock

As part of my learning experience about the Urals region, I decided to immerse myself in Urals Rock!  Not as painful as it sounds, Urals Rock was a music scene that developed around Ekaterinburg (then known as Sverdlovsk) and spread across the Soviet Union like wildfire, with bands such as Agata Kristi, Nautilus Pompilius and Chaif topping the charts and becoming associated, like all the best music, with the changes that were happening in society, as the Soviet Union fell apart. 

Agata Kristi

Russia's version of The Cure, Agata Kristi are a rock group from Sverdlovsk Oblast who named themselves after the English writer, Agatha Christie - eternally popular in Russia.  They come from a small town called Asbest, which has the dubious honour of being named after the towns's Asbestos industry - only in Russia!

I was a massive fan of The Cure, when I was a teenager and, whilst I quite like Agata Kristi, I think they sound quite different to The Cure and probably earned the comparison because the lead singer's hair looks a bit like Robert Smith's. 

The video I want to share with you is called Сказочная тайга (Skazochnaya Taiga), which means Fairytale Taiga from their 1995 album Opium.  The Taiga is a massive boreal forest that stretches right across the top of the world, including the Urals region.  To be honest, it's not so much a Fairytale Taiga, as a nightmare one.  The imagery is dark, angry clouds, drunken stars and Satan lurking in the forest at night collecting fresh souls!  The song makes an interesting reference to the розовый снег (rosovy sneg) or pink snow, perhaps a reference to the fact that the last Tsars' family, the Romanoff's, were murdered in Ekaterinburg?



By the way, the video shows scenes from one of the most famous and best-loved Soviet movies, Иван Васильевич меняет профессию - Ivan Vasilievich changes Profession - which is a comedy about Ivan the Terrible time-travelling and arriving in the Soviet Union.  It also shows the actors as they were in the '90's, having a reunion and watching scenes from the movie. 

Nautilus Pompilius

Nautilus Pompilius (named after a type of sea mollusc), also known more simply as Nau, were big in the 1980's and possibly started the trend of rock bands coming from the Urals region.  I must admit, I know quite a lot of Russian music, but I didn't listen to any of these bands, as they were popular long before my time in Russia.  I really like this band though and they remind me of The Cure much more than Agata Kristi does.

They were also from Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) and a lot of their hits in the 80's will long be associated with the Gorbachev regime and perestroika. 

The song I want to share with you is from their 1989 album, Человек без имени (Chelovek bez imeni) or 'Man without a name' and is called Падший Ангел (Padshiy Anghel) or Fallen Angel.  It's not one of their most famous songs, by any means, but I really like it, especially the opening riff, which could be straight from one of The Cure's albums.  Sorry about the sound quality, which is a bit tinny!



The lyrics are, predictably, quite gloomy - dreams about running in the forest at night, being chased by wild animals with eyes like lamps.  The singer describes himself as an angel who has been ripped from the sky and thrown to earth - I guess it could be a metaphor for the political situation people found themselves in, one day living in the clouds of a socialist dream, the next day finding themselves in a depressed world, being hunted by wild animals!

Chaif

The song I've chosen by Ekaterinburg rock band Chaif is an iconic song that many Russians love and will sing at parties.  It's a bit maudlin, but being Irish, I like that!  It comes from their 7th album Давай вернёмся (Davai verniomsa) Let's go back which was released in 1991, around the time the Soviet Union fell apart. 

The name of the song is Никто не услышит (Nikto nie uslishit) Nobody's Listening, but it's also known as Ой-йо (Oi-yo) after the plaintive refrain of the chorus.  In the first verse, we hear how the singer misses his friends and feels depressed by the news in the papers.  In the second verse, he explains that his neighbours have hit the booze, because the factory is on strike, his wife has left him for another man and all the time in the background, politicians on TV are telling him how society is going to continue, but he rejects this because he knows that they are lying.  In the final verse, he dreams of the spring time when he'll be able to go fishing with his mates and forget about the troubles of the world.
It's a very Russian застольная песня (drinking song) and I feel his pain!!

Chicherina

A much lighter sound, also from Ekaterinburg, is a soft-rock band called Chicherina (named after the lead singer, Yulia Chicherina).  The song I've chosen Блюдца (Bludtsa) Saucers, is basically a love song about a young girl who sees that everything around her, even the sky and sea, have got someone, but she hasn't.  The main lyrics are all about broken plates/a girl cries/girls laugh, which I think is a metaphor for having your heart broken, then crying about it, but eventually you'll be able to laugh again! 

Interestingly the video shows Yulia messing about on a golf course with her mates, smashing up expensive vases and having a tremendous amount of fun - I guess that was their idea of a good day out in Ekaterinburg in the 1990's. 
Smyslovye Gallyutsinatsii

Not the easiest name to remember, but a fantastic band, I've become a bit obsessed by one of their biggest hits, Вечно молодой (Vechno molodoi) Forever Young, a song that was also made famous as the title track in Брат 2 (Brat dva) Brother 2 - a popular Russian movie from 2000. 



Smyslovye Gallyutsinatsii translates as something like 'Semantic Hallucinations' and the lyrics of the song are quite cryptic 'I could drink the sea/I could be someone completely different' - the sound of the sax in the background absolutely gets under my skin and I love it!  There's also a fantastic remix by DJ Nejtrino, which you can also find on YouTube at the following link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAJqxzzQCYE

Urals Federal District - Beef Stroganoff

Beef Stroganoff is not so much a typical Russian dish, as a recipe that is typical of Russian dishes.  What I mean is that you won't necessarily find a lot of Russians cooking a dish and calling it Beef Stroganoff (or Beef Stroganov - I prefer the slightly Frenchified spelling with double 'f'), but you will find a lot of Russians throwing together beef, mushrooms and onion, whipping it into a frenzy of soured cream and dumping a whole load of fresh parsley (петрушка) on top!

I picked this dish because it is one I've never cooked before, but also because of the historical connections with the illustrious Stroganov family, who were instrumental in opening up the Urals region to Russian colonisation.  Beef Stroganoff has travelled the world and has become popular in its more traditional forms in Hong Kong, Britain and the US.  It has also been adapted to suit local tastes in countries as far apart as Sweden and Brazil.  The dish I made was inspired by a recipe I found at allrecipes.co.uk

Ingredients

300g of steak, sliced into strips
1 large onion
150g of button mushrooms
100ml of Beef stock
A dash of Worcestershire sauce
A cap-full of good quality French brandy
I garlic clove (crushed)
4 tablespoons of sour cream
A handful of fresh parsley (chopped), plus a few sprigs of parsley to garnish
Salt and Pepper to taste

Preparation

It was a very easy dish to make -

First, I fried the onion and mushroom over a medium heat for about 4 minutes, then I poured in the stock and Worcestershire sauce, let this come to boiling point, before turning down the heat and cooking the vegetables for another five minutes with the lid on and two minutes with the lid only partially on (to let out some of the steam). 

Once I'd cooked the veg, I removed them with a slotted spoon and put them in a warm dish with a lid on top.  I then added the strips of beef to the pan, bunged up the heat and let them brown in the remaining liquid. 

I remember when I was a child, our next-door neighbours bought an electric cooker and we thought it was the coolest (and poshest) thing ever, miles better than our own gas cooker!  What I wouldn't give now to cook with gas rather than electric.  I find you can control your cooking better with gas, increasing or decreasing the heat very quickly, an electric hob isn't quite as exciting any more :-(

It also meant that I couldn't 'pour in the brandy and ignite it', as the original recipe suggested.  I did try to think of ways of igniting the brandy, but decided against it for health and safety reasons (and because I quite fancy keeping my eyebrows, the Christmas photos wouldn't look the same without them!).  In the end,  I just well . . . added the brandy slowly and watched the alcohol evaporate before I'd had a chance to stir in my crushed garlic.

Once the meat was well-cooked, I returned the vegetables to the pan and cooked gently for another few minutes, before slapping on the four tablespoons of sour cream and dumping a flourish of parsley on top.  I mixed the sour cream and parsley in with the other ingredients, let it cook for another five minutes and, hey presto! the result was a successful Beef Stroganoff.

I plated it up with mashed potato, on the recommendation of my Russian partner.  I think Beef Stroganoff is traditionally served with rice in Britain and the US, but Russians prefer to have it with potato.  The result was tasty and I look forward to making it again, perhaps adding a few spices to make it a bit more interesting.

Image credits:

All photos were taken by me on my personal camera.  Please feel free to use or reproduce any of these images, for non-commercial purposes, on a share-alike attribution basis, as defined by the Creative Commons License.

Urals Federal District - Dr Zhivago

I've read a few 'heavy-duty' Russian epics in my time (eg. Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment) and Dr Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, is a novel of epic proportions.  I must admit, a mere twenty pages into the novel, I found myself double-checking the publication date (1957), as the style it's written in is like something straight out of the 19th century.

Pasternak and Zhivago

Pasternak was a well-known writer and poet in the Soviet Union, long before Dr Zhivago was smuggled to the West by Pasternak's friend Isaiah Berlin.  The novel was an instant hit in the West, but suppressed in the Soviet Union, because of the political views it espoused.  It's quite telling that Dr Zhivago was only published after Stalin's death and that Pasternak continued to live in the Soviet writer's colony outside Moscow, Peredelkino, despite having written such a controversial book.  When Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, he faced great pressure from the Soviet government to turn down the award, which he dutifully did.

Having read a bit about Pasternak's background, after finishing the novel, I can't help drawing parallels between Pasternak and his fictional hero Dr Yury Zhivago.  Both Pasternak and Zhivago came from fairly affluent artistic backgrounds (Pasternak's father was a well-known Russian painter).  They both sympathised with the revolution initially, becoming more and more disillusioned as the horrors of the Civil War reduced Russia to a barbarian state.  They both decided to stay in Russia, despite the repressive nature of the new Bolshevik government. 

Something that's difficult for a lot of Westerners to understand is how much Russians love their country.  I think we all presume that life is so hard there, they would rather be anywhere else, but it's almost as if the opposite is true!  Practising the third conditional with my students in Moscow, the question 'If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you like to live?' invariably received the answer Russia, whereas I'm sure a lot of people in Ireland and Britain could think of more exotic places to live (Barbados, Tahiti etc.)  At first, I thought this was a lack of imagination on the part of my Russian students, but I realise now that the question is simply a 'no-brainer' for most Russians.

Pasternak stayed in the Soviet Union, likewise Zhivago refused to flee to Mongolia or China, or to rejoin his wife and children in Paris.  In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, published 80 years earlier, the main character Raskolnikov would rather stay in Russia and accept his punishment, than go into exile in America.  Zhivago is not an actual surname in Russia, but is a play on the Russian word for 'life/live' zhizn/zhit'/zhivoy.  Dr Zhivago symbolises the continuation of life in Russia, after a period of great turmoil and upheaval. 

The Personification of Nature

There are several themes running through the novel, one of the most glaringly obvious, and treated beautifully in the language he uses, is Pasternak's personification of nature.  Just as Dr Zhivago (a human) symbolises some kind of natural life-force, Russia herself, her landscapes and the familiarity of her seasons, become human in their moods and actions.  Something as natural as a snow-storm is given a life and character of its own.  As Lara's innocence melts away in the spring, so the 'water drops lisped, the thaw muttered its spells'.  Pasternak gives nature its own language, therefore making it human, as language is what separates us from the non-human world.  As the boats are moved in early winter from the river to the people's gardens, they're described as 'migrating storks'. 

There are two very touching scenes in the novel that illustrate this.  The first is when Dr Zhivago is travelling with his family from Moscow to the Urals and the trees along the way are described as holding out napkins of snow to the train, a reference to the Russian tradition of welcoming guests by holding out a napkin with bread and salt.  The second scene is when Dr Zhivago leaves the train and goes wandering in the forest, he lies down on the sun-speckled forest floor and melts into the natural background.  It's when he is most at peace and far-away from the troubles of the human world around him. 

It's ironic that so many Russians now live in horrible industrial cities, far from the 'nature' that they love so much.  Perhaps the cities are horrible because Russians don't really believe in them and are simply waiting for the long summer evenings and weekends at the dacha, the joy of hunting for mushrooms in the forest and roasting sausages on an open fire, far away from the crowds of people and endless bustle of trains and cars.

Trains and death

Which brings me nicely onto another theme, not just in Dr Zhivago, but also in novels like Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  Like a lot of countries, Russia's fate seems to have been sealed by the development of the railway.  There's the Trans-Siberian Express, of course, one of the world's most famous railway journeys, six and half days from Moscow to Vladivostok and a lot of towns in the Urals region and Siberia owe their very existence to the fact that they were built to service the Trans-Siberian route.  A large chunk of the novel happens on the train journey from Moscow to the Urals fictional town of Yuryatin (probably based on Perm).  Trains symbolised progress and movement, societies in transition, as the world was transformed by this revolutionary method of transport.

I can't help noticing how often trains are responsible for the deaths of characters in Russian novels.  Dr Zhivago's father commits suicide by throwing himself off a moving train, Dr Zhivago has a heart attack whilst travelling on a tram in Moscow, Anna Karenina commits suicide by throwing herself under a train.  It's an interesting sub-theme in Russian literature and one I would like to explore more.  Not only in Russian literature either: I seem to remember that Lantier in Zola's La Bete Humaine also died by falling off a moving train.  Just as nature is idealised in novels from the 19th century onwards, industrial innovations like the railway are feared and regarded as a cause of death. 

Lara's ruin and the English novel

The subtitle of the edition of Dr Zhivago that I read is 'One of the greatest love stories ever told'.  Whilst reading the novel, I realised that it's much more than a love story and there are bigger themes at play than this subtitle suggests.  Nevertheless, Zhivago's passion for Lara Antipova is an important theme in the novel, as is his love for his family and Tonya, his legal wife.  What I found most interesting about all of this is that Lara's story begins (rather than ends) with her being ruined by an older gentleman friend of her seamstress mother.  I couldn't help comparing this to the heroine of an English novel, whose ruination would, most definitely, come at the end of the novel. 

One thing I love about the Russians is that they are quite practical about 'matters of the heart' and don't tend to take a moral high ground or judge other people's relationships, in the way that we love to do in Ireland and Britain.  Lara is not condemned for being a fallen woman, but becomes the real heroine of the novel, an incredibly kind woman who is even more respected, it would seem, because of the fact that she isn't perfect.  Zhivago's wife, Tonya, who is morally 'pure' and would be a perfect character in a Jane Austen novel, becomes irrelevant in this Russian one and can't support Zhivago when he needs her most.  Likewise, the fact that Zhivago is 'living in sin' with Lara is barely relevant to the events of the book and, in many ways, their relationship is one of the only things that makes sense in the chaotic world they find themselves in. 

The Suffering of the Jewish people in World War 1

An interesting theme that Pasternak raises in the novel and one, I admit, I've never thought about before, is how badly the Jews were treated during the First World War.  I guess it's inevitable that the horrors of WW2 and the Holocaust have obscured the discrimation and suffering that Jewish communities experienced before that.  There's no doubt that Jews also suffered horrendously during World War One.  From the Russian point of view, this war was fought on the Eastern Front, modern-day Ukraine and Belarus and those parts of the old Russian Empire where the existence of Jewish communities was 'tolerated'.  Pasternak was Jewish, as were many of the Bolshevik leaders.  Russia has the third biggest Jewish population in the world (the country with the biggest Jewish population is the United States, with Israel being number two).  It's a theme I'd like to explore even more, as it's something you don't really hear much about. 

10 reasons why I think the book was banned

When I first started reading the novel, I couldn't understand what was so controversial about the book that meant it couldn't be published in Russia during the soviet period.  I started making a list of reasons as I was going along and, as you'll see below, I have come up with 10 main reasons why the soviet authorities would have opposed the publication of this novel. 

1. It was anti-nationalist.  There is a paragraph early in the novel when Zhivago questions the nature of the Russian national identity, a very controversial issue in Russia, even in modern times.

2. It had a spiritual quality to it.  It's not a religious book, as such, but the way Pasternak idolises the natural world, would have raised a few eyebrows in Soviet Moscow!

3. It wasn't suitably upbeat about the revolution, but also told of the hardship, starvation and suffering that happened after the October Revolution.

4. The novel depicts trade on the black market, even at the height of revolutionary anti-capitalism, a view that wouldn't have been condoned by the soviet authorities.

5. During the epic train journey to the Urals, Zhivago suggests that the new worker's revolutionary government didn't really have the peasant's best interest at heart and that it was only substituting one kind of repression (under the Tsars) with another (under the Soviets). 

6. As the train passes through the Volga region on its way to the Urals, Zhivago witnesses a country in open revolt against the competing Red and White Guards.  The novel depicts the period as anarchic and highlights a massacre by the Red Guard, which is not a version of history that would have been accepted by Pasternak's government, even in the 1950's.

7. In his conversation with Semdevyatov, on the train, Zhivago openly slates Marxism as a type of politics that is far from the truth.

8. At times it would seem as though Zhivago openly sympathises with the Whites.

9. Zhivago is disillusioned with the revolution, especially when he rejoins Lara in Yuryatin.  Again not the progressive opinion officialdom would expect a Soviet writer to portray.

10.  Towards the end of the novel, Pasternak refers to the existence of gulags, a very controversial issue at the time and one that led to fellow-Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn being expelled from the Soviet Union and stripped of his citizenship in 1974. 

The Movie

As part of my learning experience, I watched David Lean's award-winning screen adaptation of the novel, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie.  It was a great pleasure to watch this visually-stunning movie again, especially as the novel was so fresh in my mind.  Lean took to heart a lot of the criticisms of his adaptation, but I think he did a great job.  He was criticised for cutting down the number of characters and reducing the First World War scenes to a five minute narration sequence, but I think it was probably a good idea to do both these things.  Movies can't handle the complexity of novels and are definitely more watchable if the number of characters is kept to a logical minimum.  Not surprisingly the movie was banned in the Soviet Union and wasn't shown in Russia until the mid-90's. 

Image credits:

I've used the flag of Perm for this blogpost, although Perm Oblast isn't part of the Urals Federal District, it is deemed to be in the Urals and Pasternak spent some time living there and probably used Perm as the basis for his fictional Urals town, Yuryatin.  This image was shared on Wikimedia Commons by wikiuser Panther and you can see its description page at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Perm.png

The painting is by Boris Pasternak's father, Leonid, and depicts a young Boris with his brother Aleksandr.  It is copyright free and in the public domain. 

The image of the book cover is one I took myself, I read the 2002 Vintage edition (Random House).  The photograph on the cover depicts White Russian Troops 1919 (c) Corbis. 

The images of stills from the movie were also from photos taken by me.  These stills are being used to illustrate this blogpost and promote David Lean's movie version.  By publishing these photos, I'm not condoning or encouraging reproduction of these images on the Internet or anywhere else.  These photos are not meant to bring the actors into disrepute or suggest their endorsement of this blogpost, but are meant to promote the amazing performances of these actors in this movie. 

The first still shows Julie Christie in the role of Lara Antipova in the scene where Lara and Yury Zhivago are reunited in the library at Yuryatin.

The second still shows Omar Sharif in the role of Dr Yury Zhivago, as he reads the all-important letter from Moscow, informing him that Tonya has moved to Paris with his children.

The third still shows Omar Sharif in the role of Dr Zhivago, after he has deserted the Red Guards and is walking back to Yuryatin through the bitter Siberian winter. 

Urals Federal District - an Overview

It's 4,730 miles (7,613 kilometres) from the Togolese capital, Lome, to Ekaterinburg, capital of the Urals Federal district.  It's so typical of Russia that my first two posts are taken up by explaining the nature of the Russian Federation and the bureaucracy involved in administering this massive country!  This post is intended as an overview of the Urals Federal Region and its six constituent parts.

If the Urals Federal District were a country, it would be the 17th biggest country in the world.  It's a bit smaller than Indonesia and bigger than Libya.  It's also slightly bigger than the biggest US state, Alaska.  Although this massive region only contains 8.5% of Russia's entire population (UFD has the same amount of people as Greece), the people and businesses in this region pay a whopping 42% of Russia's tax bill.  It's by far the richest region in Russia and produces 90% of Russia's natural gas and 68% of Russia's oil. 

During the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90's, the governor of the Urals Region, Eduard Rossell, tried to establish a Urals Republic.  It lasted a mere 10 days, before being dissolved by the (ironically, Urals-born) Russian President, Boris Yeltsin.  With all of its wealth, I can understand why the Russian Federation would be reluctant to let go of the Urals Region. 

The Urals Region was 'opened up' to Russian colonisation in the 1550's, after the defeat of the Tatars, paving the way for Russian colonisation of the entire Ural Region, Siberia and the Far East.  The Urals Federal District today is made up of four oblast or regions and two autonomous okrug.  They are:

Kurgan Oblast (1) - a 'small' region, about the size of Ireland, north of the border with Kazakhstan.  This region has a population of about 1 million people, most of whom are Russian and is administered from the city of Kurgan.  Kurgan is one of the oldest Russian settlements in the region, being founded in the mid-17th century and is a stopping point on the Trans-Siberian railway.

Sverdlovsk Oblast (2) - is the heart of the Urals Federal District and with its administrative centre at Ekaterinburg, capital of the whole Urals region.  The region is named after a Jewish Bolshevik, Yakov Sverdlov.  It was common practice after the Russian Revolution to rename 'Tsarist' cities like Ekaterinburg after prominent revolutionary figures, especially dead ones like Sverdlov (who died in the 'Spanish flu' epidemic of 1919). 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, many cities decided to revert to their original names, the most famous being St Petersburg (a.k.a. Leningrad).  In a particularly Russian manner, ie. not hedging one's bets, whilst the cities returned to their Tsarist names, the oblast retained their Soviet names (just in case!).  Hence we have Ekaterinburg as the capital of Sverdlovsk region and St Petersburg as the capital of Leningrad region!

Tyumen Oblast (3) - is another 'small' region, about the size of Tunisia!  It has a much more mixed population, being only 70% Russian, with around 7% each of Tatars and Ukranians.  Before I moved to Russia, I didn't really realise how ethnically diverse it is - again, associating everything with Russian culture and ethnic Russians. 

It might surprise people to know that Tyumen Oblast, as an example, has dozens of different ethnic groups (in a population of about 3 million people) and is one of the most ethnically diverse regions in the Russian Federation.  These groups include Germans, Greeks, Koreans, Roma, Armenians and Bulgarians, to name but a few.  It might also surprise you to know that there are half a million ethnic Germans in Russia and about 100,000 ethnic Greeks!  I'm sure that they are all Russian-speaking and they hold Russian passports, although they keep links to their 'home' culture and language, with varying degrees of success. 

Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug (4) - is the homeland of the native Khanty and Mansi tribes.  They are Ob-Ugric peoples and their Uralic languages are distantly related to both Finnish and Hungarian!  Long before the Russians arrived on the scene, the Urals region gave birth to a range of cultures, including Hungarian tribes, possibly the Celts and some people even believe that all Indo-European cultures came from this region!  If I have time in a later blog, I'd like to explore some the language families of this part of Russia, as I find this subject fascinating and an area of Linguistics that I know very little about.

Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (6) - is a region in the far north of Russia, bordering the Arctic Ocean.  It is about six times the size of England, but with the same population as Bristol!  It is the homeland of another Ob-Ugric tribe, the Nenets, although they only make up 5% of the total population.  I have a personal connection with Yamalo-Nenets AO, in that my sister-in-law spent some time living and working in its second biggest city, Novy Urengoy.  I never got the chance to go there, but I remember her stopping off to stay with us in Moscow, before embarking in the three or four day train journey to this remote region. 

Chelyabinsk Oblast (5) - centred around the city of Chelyabinsk, is a place I know practically nothing about.  I do know that it is one of the places that the Decembrists, early 19th-century revolutionaries, mostly from St Petersburg, were exiled to.  Among the Decembrists were many of St Petersburg's intellectual elite and their exile to the east, led to the Urals and Siberian regions being considered havens for intellectual and political freedom.  Many Decembrists were, famously, followed into exile by their wives, inspiring generations of Russian writers and poets, when their turn came to reinterpret the events of Russian history. 

I think the whole region languishes in obscurity for most people from the West, being somehow hidden behind the veneer of Russia.  There's a lot more to this region than meets the eye and I want to spend the next few weeks unravelling the secrets of this region and measuring the impact Urals culture, people and industry has had on Russia as a whole. 

Image credits:

Yet more evidence that I must have been Russian in a former life is our common love of flags.  I find the array of Russian flags really beautiful and have used sources in Wikimedia Commons to find flags for this blog, as well as the map of the Urals region.  The history of each of these files is quite complicated and sometimes involves several wikiusers, so it's probably easier for me to provide the links to the original file descriptions (below):

Flag of Ekaterinburg:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Yekaterinburg_(Sverdlovsk_oblast).svg

Map of the Urals Region:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Urals_Federal_District_(numbered).svg

Flag of Kurgan Oblast: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Kurgan_Oblast.svg

Flag of Sverdlovsk Oblast: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Sverdlovsk_Oblast.svg

Flag of Tyumen Oblast:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Tyumen_Oblast.svg

Flag of Yugra (Khanty-Mansi AO):  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Yugra.svg

Flag of Yamalo-Nenets AO:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Yamal-Nenets_Autonomous_District.svg

Flag of Chelyabinsk Oblast:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Chelyabinsk_Oblast.svg