It’s just a little airborne - it’s still good, it’s still good.
That line actually has it’s own Facebook page.
Don’t forget Poland!
But thats Western propaganda for the most part. The USSR was a lot more inclusive of nationalities than the Russian Empire was an non Russians in positions of power were quite common, Stalin obviously, but Beria, Breznahev, Eduard Schavanazhe etc come to mind. During the invasion of Hungry in 1956, IIRC both the senior field commanders were Muslims, that would never have happened under the Czars.
In the US, or in the USSR? I lived in Moscow in 1977, and both Americans and other English speaking foreigners, as well as people speaking in Russian of “Rossiya,” and “Soviyetski Soyuz,” did not confuse the two. I think it was drilled into children in school, but there was some xenophobia in it as well. The different republics were comprised of people of different ethnic backgrounds, and no one liked to be confused with another. Estonians did not want to be thought of as Slavs, and the Slavic Russians did not want to be thought of as anything but Russian. Even though a Georgian was obviously a Georgian from his name, if he spoke Russian like a Russian, and looked a little more Slavic than a typical Georgian, he could get a better job in Moscow, (much as the government insisted that didn’t happen), but like hell he was telling his family he was “passing.”
Very true, in the US.
I was a kid when the USSR was still around. Although I heard “Russia” used to refer to it a lot, “Soviet Union” was the main term used to refer to it. Only teachers and people on the news used “USSR” or “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”.
Which czars were Georgian?
Maybe an “out-there” idea: but might this have been a deliberate choice by the high-ups – less risk of these guys perhaps sympathising with the Hungarians and going easy on them, than there might have been with European Soviet citizens?
Why would you think that? If anything, members of a national minority within the Soviet Union might be more likely to sympathise with other nations.
(For the record, I think one of the local Soviet commanders was Armenian, and the other Ossetian. Neither were Russian, but only the Ossetian is likely to have come from a Muslim background. Whether he himself was a Muslim I cannot say.)
FWIW, there was a definite hierarchy of ethnicities in the Soviet Union, with Russians on top, and other Slavs (Ukrainians, Byelo-Russians) next, then Estonians, because they are related to Finns, and the Soviet Union was trying to stay on Finland’s good side, then other Europeans (eg, Latvians), then the central countries who were borderline European-Asian, but looked Caucasian, like the Georgians (who, if they had a Russian Orthodox rather than Catholic or Muslim family background, rated a lot higher, despite the fact that everyone was supposed to profess atheism) then the Turkic people, like the majority people in Kazakstan and Uzbekistan were last (I’ve been to those countries, BTW, and the Russians were not above making them huge tourist destinations).
The Russians held a majority in the government, and could enforce this. Konstantin Chernenko was Ukrainian, and Brezhnev was half Ukrainian and half Russian, but other than them, the only non-Russian to lead the USSR was Stalin, who was Georgian, and may have felt he had something to prove.
ETA: Stalin at age 23.
Chernenko was born and raised in Russia, and official biographies say that he’s Russian. If you’re going to class him as Ukrainian based on ancestry alone, then you might as well say that Andropov was Finnish.
On the other hand, they had no problem in giving minority persons, sensitive and powerful positions. Unlike the US of that time, at least until the 1980’s.
Just a wild “notion out of nowhere”: but the USSR was a suspicion-filled, paranoid, and – despite its protestations – not very rational, place. Thoughts, perhaps, of age-old Hungarian / Muslim enmity (revisiting the battle of Mohacs, 1526, at which Turkey defeated Hungary and subsequent to which, annexed much erstwhile Hungarian territory). Maybe indeed total nonsense.
A minor thing overall: but, within the context of what the religious see as a basically sinful and fallen world, there are a few countries re which the general perception is (who knows how-come with these particular places ?) their people tend to be in the main virtuous and honourable, beyond the overall average for flawed mankind. Estonia is a country which I’ve seen mentioned as in this category. I think Solzhenitsyn says at some place in Gulag, something to the effect that he’d encountered many Estonians in his term in the “Gulagverse”, but never run across a bad one. (Not to suggest that no Estonian has ever been a scumbag – just that the incidence of same, seems less than with many nationalities.) Maybe the Soviet leaders wanted the Estonians “on side”, because they saw them as worth having?
[sidetrack] Funny, that describes my impression of the cold war U.S. just as well. [/st]
Well, they gave persons from minorities positions of power–just as the U.S. did, on occasion. Whether they had “no problem” doing so might be an area that needs a bit more exploration. There was often a certain amount of “He got that job even though he was not from Russia” when discussing various people of importance.
WITHIN the Soviet Union, Russia was supposed to be just the largest of a group of equal republics.
As a practical matter, once the Germans invaded, Stalin was only too happy to play the patriotic card and whip up the Russian nationalism he had disdained earlier. From 1941 on, it was quite safe to speak of Mother Russia again.
Nobody at Stalingrad was fighting for the USSR- they were fighting for RUSSIA.
No one gave Stalin his job. :eek:
As best I can tell, neither country has changed significantly in this regard.
Another sidetrack: Here’s a long thread about the Soviet Union and no one’s made an in-Soviet-Russia joke. You guys are slipping.
The US did before the 1980s? So please enlighten me. Name one. Kissinger is about it.
It was my understanding that the Soviets intentionally stationed their troops away from where their ethnic/religious groups lived so that in case of insurrection or an invasion of a nearby country the Soviet forces would be less likely to sympathize with the local populace. An example being that during the invasion of Afghanistan no troops from the 'stans were used, rather Russian and Ukrainian troops were used, and the Muslim troops were kept well away. I remember reading this back in the 80’s, so don’t ask for a cite.
I won’t ask you for a cite, because there are plenty of cites available that counter that claim. C Asia units and formationswere disproportionatley used in the Soviet War in Afghanistan. 20,000 of the initial attacking force infact