Soviet, Not Russian

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Clarissa

April 23, 2013

I was listening to a student present her research on post-WWII Germany but couldn’t concentrate because the student’s insistence on referring to the Soviet soldiers as “Russians” was very grating.

Not only weren’t all of those soldiers Russian, some of them barely even spoke the Russian language. At the same time, those who were ethnically Russian would not, with rare exceptions, have identified as Russian. Stalin really didn’t like that kind of thing, you know.

It is really annoying to see how many people buy into Russia’s attempts to erase the other 14 republics of the USSR from the Soviet experience. Remember, whenever you use the words “Russian” and “Soviet” interchangeably, you are making Comrade Putin very happy.

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5 responses to “Soviet, Not Russian”

David Gendron

April 23, 2013

Out of topic: http://petapixel.com/2013/02/11/woman-photographs-herself-receiving-strange-looks-in-public/

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musteryou

April 23, 2013

Ideological warfare often deliberately entails obscuring true identities. I read that when the insurgency started in Rhodesia, the spokesmen referred to the British settlers in that country as “Boers”. Those are the originally Dutch settlers, speaking Afrikaans, much further south. But ever since the war, thirty years ago, there are few Australians who can differentiate between Zimbabwe and South Africa. So the distortions remain.

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Kathleen

April 23, 2013

Did you give her some feedback?

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Benoni

April 24, 2013

The teacher who taught me A-level Soviet history did this gratingly often. He once referred to Stalin and Beria’s murder of Trotsky as “the best example of Russian political homicide”. Which is funny for an exchange between two Georgians and a Ukrainian.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  April 24, 2013
  
  Exactly. Except Trotsky was a Jew, which makes everything even more complicated.
  
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