North Caucasus

TASS is showing this.

FSB has thwarted a sabotage attack on a gas pipeline in the North Caucasian region of Kabardino-Bakaria, the agency said.

And when I looked into the article, it was just, you know, they're saying this is a Russian national who is planning to attack this pipeline.

I don't know if it's actually Ukraine related or not.

But the second reason was a more utilitarian and pragmatic one.

So as our listeners probably know, from 28 onwards until 34, Kazakhstan and Other regions in the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, especially North Caucasus, the Volga region, experienced mass man-made hunger.

First, there was the campaign of decolonization, so getting rid of the richer peasant elements in Kazakhstan, it took the form of debaization.

So getting rid of, also deporting, exiling the most affluential nomads.

If one sister felt a pang of guilt, the other three would justify the cruelty, reinforcing the delusion that their victims were less than human.

That concept of familial validation leads perfectly into a much more modern case operating from 2007 to 2013 in the North Caucasus region of Russia.

The Russian media dubbed them the Gang of Amazon.

This one is particularly disturbing because of the family dynamic.

They're giving Stalin first priority for P-39 era Cobras.

Roosevelt was even offering to send U.S. pilots to help Stalin in the areas over the North Caucasus and Stalingrad.

But Stalin's position was wrong.

unwavering.

In recent days, search teams in Nepal have rescued four people, including a Chinese national who was pulled from a tunnel yesterday.

and at least 11 people are dead after an avalanche hit climbers in Russia's North Caucasus.

Six others were injured.

The avalanche swept along Mount Mizrugi, one of the highest peaks in Russia's North Caucasus, hitting a group of 33 climbers.

Six climbers remain missing.

A housing provider says cold, damp homes are contributing to poor winter health.

Picture this.

It's somewhere on the Eastern Front, maybe the summer of 1942, somewhere in the North Caucasus or along the river line near Stalingrad.

A German soldier is on watch in the dark, cold-tired, scanning the sky the way soldiers scan the sky when they know enemy aircraft have been working the area at night.

And he hears it, not an engine, not a roar, a whisper, a soft rushing sound moving through the black sky overhead, like silk dragging through the air, like something that has no business being up there.

The German High Command eventually issued a standing order.

Any pilot who shot down a Night Witch aircraft would receive the Iron Cross immediately.

The regiment began operations in the spring of 1942 in the North Caucasus region and flew almost continuously from that point through the end of the war.

The standard was six to eight sorties per crew per night.

That's the way it works.

The following proclamation with Loutzer, Special Representative of the All-Russian Cheka for the Northern Caucasus, addressed to the populations of the Kuban District and the Black Sea Littoral, will illustrate better than anything else the state of things when those regions were held by the Bolshevist Don Army.

Said the document, one, any village or hamlet found to be harboring persons connected to either the white forces or the green shall be razed to the ground.

and its adult inhabitants shot, and its property confiscated.

The policy of collectivization directly ties into probably the most infamous of Stalin's crimes, the Holodomor.

That is the term for the famine Stalin created in Ukraine and the predominantly ethnically Ukrainian areas in the Northern Caucasus in 1932 and 1933.

And yes, you heard me correctly.

Stalin created this disaster.

Because, as I discussed back in the first few episodes, it was a time of major developments.

You have the Sumerian arrival in Lower Mesopotamia, the early stages of the Uruk expansion, and, most relevant to our story, the emergence of the Mykop culture of the North Caucasus foothills.

As I covered back in Episode A2, the primary Mykop claims to fame were their early development of arsenical bronze and their prime location at a regional crossroads.

Between Mesopotamia, the Northern Steppe, the Balkans, and various outposts in South and Central Asia.