Oh my gosh, that's awesome to hear! I definitely know how into Russia you are, knowing you'll get to be there a whole Summer sounds wonderful! It's like how I hope to travel to South London one of these days, ahhh.

Peace to, Orenthes-bud! ^^u^^

Oh man how I wish it was a whole summer, it's a quick little trip for about a couple of weeks, similar in length to my stay in Cape Town. But I'm going to love every moment of it.

And it certainly won't be my last adventure in Russia.

Heeeee, couple of weeks certainly isn't a slouch of time! Ahhh, gosh I'm excited for you though!

I am too! :}

Plus I suspect I will make a fair amount of friends in Russia, I have never been teribly opposed to Russia's legitimate claim to the Crimea. I see the matter differently than most here do ahah.

Dude congrats! It's going to be such an awesome and amazing trip for you! And really it's going to be such a good experience too, a trip of a lifetime.

Ayup, I deeply adored Cape Town and the wonderful opportunity I had to go there.

Russia, however, is my life's dream. And this will be merely my first foray. I intend to return there, just like with South Africa.

Sounds sexy. Eat lots of things for me :3

It's Russia, you know I will :}.

Take me with youuuuuuuuu ;n;

Bro you live in Italy! That's a great and awesome place I would love to visit as well ahah. Still... Russia is sooo cool.

Plus I have a distant relation who was from Veneto so I would want to visit there.

Oooooh really? that will be nice actually :P

Yeah, not as many Italians went to the States as went to Argentina (so many Italians went to Argentina, in fact, that Argentine Spanish sounds a lot like Italian in terms of accent and pronunciation of words), but I have some very distant descent from one of the rare North Italian immigrants.

Take advantage of as much of that trip as you can; not many folks get the opportunity to travel the world.

I am waaaay ahead of you on that note Basil , I intend to take full advantage.

Congrats, man. Hope you have fun! And take lots of pictures. I find Russia very interesting myself

Oh I fully intend to.

And I couldn't agree more on how interesting Russia is :>.

Russia has a fascinatingly complex history of political structures so I'm sure you'll enjoy it! :3 hope you have fun!

Oh, I studied Russian history at university, so I appreciate it all the more :}. Not a lot of folks know, for instance, that the Russian Empire in 1912 had a larger Muslim population than the Ottoman Empire.

...huh

Yanno that doesn't SOUND right but then people forget how huge Russia's empire actually was in spanning waayyyy down central Asia. Actually I have something that may interest you, have you ever heard of the photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii?

He made several AMAZING colour photographs of the Russian Empire and how far it spanned back 100 years ago and really they are quite incredible! - http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/20.....ntury_ago.html


Sorry for the dumb survey the site makes you take in order to see the rest of them but believe me it's worth it for them actually telling you what each picture is about and where it was taken. I hope you like :3

Well keep in mind 1912 was a year of imperial decline for the Ottoman Empire: they steadily lost territory over the course of the 19th century and this process was completed by the Balkan Wars of the early 20th century and then set up the final collapse in WWI. Russia, however, had steadily conquered southward and eastward over centuries, bringing more and more Muslims under Russian rule. They were the second-biggest confessional group in the Empire behind Christians of all stripes (not merely the Orthodox but also Catholics in Poland and Ukraine along with Lutherans in the Baltic, fortunately no Wee Frees .)

Oh, believe me, I am quite familiar with Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, I used lots of stills from his images for my presentation on the Russian colonization of Central Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries. That man *made* my presentation.

I find this very relevant to now because of the Eurovision Song Contest that happens every year around this week and, to absolutely nobody's surprise, all the former Russian territories such as Armenia and whatnot, almost always vote for Russia to win.

I am not sure if this love is genuine or if it is out of fear XD but either way...good luck to you all the same!

Armenians, like the Russians, are Orthodox Christians (Armenia was actually the first state in the world to adopt Christianity), and historically their ties are very close. The USSR, for instances, was perhaps the most powerful nation in the world to recognize the Armenian Genocide as such (this is irrelevant to debates on whether or not this event was a genocide, mind, but it just illustrates that the Soviets took the matter seriously). Moreover, today Armenia has strong military ties to Russia that remain so because of Armenia's rather troubled relationship with Azerbaijan: a nation with whom it has a major territorial dispute.

So yeah, the Armenians fear someone, but I think their fear is of the oil-rich nation with three times as many people as them on their border rather than Moscow. Armenian fondness for Russia is more a matter of cultural background and ties.

I'll be damn if you aren't the most unusual American guy I've came across.
Best of luck in the great Slavic motherland!

I take that as quite a compliment ^^.

I like that you're in a Yugoslav group. I think keeping alive a memory of better times is important, so that their return may be hastened.

I hope you're right! Someone seems to be holding the handbrake on the Balkan wheel of history.

Aye. The former Yugoslavia is really only coming back to prewar levels of prosperity these days, particularly now that Croatia has completed the EU accession process (and now that Croatia's in, Serbia and Montenegro aren't likely to be far behind). Still, for Europe's most troubled region, the Balkans has made astonishing progress in quite a short period of time. And I cannot see any reason why the region as a whole will not continue along that path.

One of my favorite Slavic (in the cultural sense) songs is Tamo Daleko, though I've no doubt you're familiar with that ahah. So hauntingly beautiful, and a sad memory of a lesser-known chapter of the First World War.

Again, I hope you are right. From what I see, the Balkan is in a state of primary capital accumulation: the ubiquitous theft of everything. Natural resources and public property is turned into private and state property, pension funds are ripped and devastated, and the unemployment is abominable. Serbia survives by selling out what was created in the Yugoslav period, and when everything is sold and the cash is spent, I think we'll have Argentinian or Greek scenario. Law is patched and updated on the fly, like Windows Update. Gazprom bought all the Serbian oil deposits for a mere $400M, which are worth about 5M liters of crude oil per year, and is paying only 3% tax to the Serbian government. If that's not neo-collonialism, I really don't know what is... But, hey, always gotta look on the bright side! At least the Russians didn't drop bombs on us, like NATO did in 1999. Heeeh! :D

My grand-grandpa was a WWI army general, and now I work in an office located in a street carrying Archibald Reiss name. Kind of coincidence perhaps. The memories are haunting and everywhere, and the best I can do is to justify the past as needless emotion. Justifying it logically would be too much to bear.

Ah yes, the famous Rudolphe Reiss, I'll never forget a quote of his regarding the cruelty of the Austrians towards the civilian population

"The massacres of the civil population were systematically organized by the command of the invading army, it's upon the command that all responsibility must rest, and also the disgrace with which this army has covered itself for all time."

A sobering and all too true condemnation of cruelty that was appalling even by the standards of rather horrendous early 20th-century warfare.