East Slavs

A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA Chapter 1.

The Slavs.

What is now European Russia, the great plain of Eastern Europe, bounded on the north by the White Sea, and on the east by the Ural Mountains, on the south by the Black Sea, and on the west by the Baltic, was about the ninth century A.D. inhabited in its central portion by the various tribes of the Eastern Slavs, who had originally migrated there from the banks of the Danube.

these slavs dwelt together in independent tribes in towns and villages surrounded by wooden stockades and ditches as a protection from wild beasts and other enemies their houses were rude wooden huts and in every family the father as head of the house held absolute sway and exacted implicit obedience matters of public importance such as the carrying on of war or the defence of the towns were decided upon in council by the members of each community and this council was called the veche and was more or less the equivalent of the saxon the slavs hunted in the vast forests and bogs that covered the country fished in the rivers tilled the ground in a rude and primitive manner and even carried on a certain amount of trade in natural products with their neighbours the women performed all household duties brought up the children and on the death of their husband were burned on his funeral pyre together with his weapons his horse and any other cherished possessions he might require in the after life the slavs believed in the immortality of the soul and thought the life beyond the grave would be a continuation of the earthly life the religion of the slavs consisted of a deification of the great elemental forces of nature and they consequently had many gods of whom the greatest were perun god of thunder and lightning dajbog or hors the god of sun and strybog god of the winds besides these gods the founder of every household was supposed after his death to return to earth in spiritual form and as the domovoi or house-god protect his descendants from many evils the slavs erected no temples to their gods and had no regular priesthood but the head of each family offered up prayer and sacrifice in his own house in early times they made no idols to their gods but later large figures of wood or stone were set up for worship in public places and before them human sacrifices were originally offered the victim being chosen by lot wizards witches pixies and mermaids of course played a great part in their superstitions and were supposed to have marvellous powers the slavs had three great festivals in the year two in honor of the sun celebrated approximately about christmas time and midsummer and the third to welcome the coming of spring hospitality was considered the greatest virtue and a poor man was even justified in stealing what was necessary for the entertainment of a stranger chapter

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And it's almost, it's, you know, it's almost kind of mythical and the enmity between, uh, Germany and the Russian people is really horrible and tragic.

I'm not like making light of that, but, uh, the Germans and the Eastern Slavs are just going to fight.

Even absent bullshitism, that's just something that's going to happen.

Hitler's real ideological nemesis was Roosevelt because, again, there wasn't any reason for America to fight Germany other than the fact that Roosevelt and his patrons slated Germany for annihilation.

They belong to the highest type of that race, but represent only a small portion of the large Slavic family.

Of the Eastern Slavs, only the southern group has moved towards America, the Russian peasant being bound to the soil and unable to free himself from the obligation of paying the heavy taxes by removal to a foreign country.

With the larger freedom which is bound to come to him will also come economic relief so that the immigration of the Russian peasant in large numbers is not a likelihood.

Lured by promises of higher wages in our industrial centers, Croatians and Slovenians come in increasingly large numbers, while in smaller numbers come Serbians and Bulgarians.

God grant thee much of early bliss, and may the saints thy forehead kiss, may wine for friends abundant flow, and children in thy household grow.

May God unite our house and land, and we thus grasp each other's hand.

Admirable as is the family tie which binds the Slav, abhorrent even to the strongest Slavophil is the position occupied by woman in the family and in the social life among southern and eastern Slavs.

To escape the charge of prejudice, I shall quote a few proverbs current among the southern Slavs, a few out of many hundreds.

Arctic Knight 98 says, I think Europe will only be at peace when Poland and Russia normalize relations.

Also, as someone from Slovenia, it hurts watching the East Slavs at war with each other like it was with us in Yugoslavia.

I completely agree with you.

And I also believe that about Russia and Poland.

Engels says this.

We could go on and on talking about the Marxists, how they despised the Slav and in particular the Eastern Slav of the Russian Orthodox.

These people were slated for annihilation.

This comes straight out of Marx and Engels.

I have a lot of papers on this, the, the condemnation, Karl Marx and his followers, that Russians are savages, uh, and have to be destroyed, have to be liquidated.

That comes straight from, uh, the middle of the, of the 19th century, not just of, um, from the Bolsheviks.

It was always this Marxist, revolutionary, and Judaic mind that said the ultimate goyim that have to be destroyed i- are Russians and Eastern Slavs in general.

That's what the revolution was.

And I think that's gradually, that's what I feel a lot more confident, again, having done more research more reading you know there's constantly new kind of dialogues going on around the questions of nationality and identity but also in my own family history you know the more I look into my own family history my mom's family is a hundred percent Jewish Ukrainian plus I mean I'm not going to give into details but they're not Russian basically at all genetically or historically you know she's only the first generation from her family to be born in Siberia My dad's family is also very mixed.

It's Eastern Slavic, but again, they're not Russian.

So the fact that we were born in Russia, but again, the more I think about it, the Ukrainian heritage was always there in the language and the accents and the food and the stories about Ukraine, of growing up in Ukraine and surviving the Holocaust in Ukraine.

So I've always kind of grown up with that sense of...

Um, the internal politics of Transylvania, I mean, to be clear, like, it, it was, it was a piss, it was, it was a patchwork of four major populations.

There was a minority of Turkish peasants and Eastern Slavs who, both of whom were sort of outside of the reigning political culture.

But the main populations were Orthodox Romanians, Calvinist Magyars, Lutheran Saxons, the Transylvanian Saxons, and, uh, some self-governing indigenous Slavic elements who, um, who were nominally Catholic, but probably abided some sort of folk belief system.

And the Prince of Wallachia was, uh, or it was, or the Prince of Transylvania was, was basically able, with a handful of exceptions, to maintain these kinds of brokering agreements between groups, particularly the three nations of, uh, you know, the Magyar nobles, the, the, the, the Saxon Ge- you know, the Saxon German Lutherans, and, um, these Orthodox Romanians.