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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Samizdata quote of the day

At this rate, they will need to open an officer’s club in hell.

– Yuriy Mysiahin, noting the remarkable number of senior Russian officers K.I.A. in Ukraine, specifically Anatoly Shterliz, the C/O of the 503rd Motorised Rifle Regiment of the 19th Motorised Rifle Division getting smoked yesterday.

22 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • Paul Marks

    War means death. And the deaths, on both sides, are on the head of Mr Putin.

    I have no patience either for those people who try and make excuses for Mr Putin, or for those idiot racists who blame “Russians” rather than Mr Putin – as if Russians and Ukrainians were difference species with a different history.

    Mr Putin is to blame for what is happening. Mr Putin must go.

  • Given the failure to prosecute the war, the various colonels and generals may feel the front line safer and less stressful than being served polonium tea in the Kremlin.

    At least at the front it is only the colonel/general that faces death, not his whole family.

  • Paul, you really need to get a grip & stop calling people “racist” who disagree with you on the issue of “is Russian culture part of the problem?”.

    It is particularly absurd when you called a Slavic commenter in a different thread “racist”, given he has been to Russia & interacted with Russians in Russia. It is entirely possible to “blame Putin” whilst also observing that the culture from which he sprung is also a problem.

  • Flubber

    Binary thinking is the mark of either a limited or propagandised intellect Paul.

  • Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker) Gray

    Perhaps Some Ukrainians have read More’s Utopia? That mentions killing of officers to defeat your enemy.

  • JJM

    With regard to the officer rank insignia shown in that Santa Monica Observer article, they’re for a captain, not a general. Also, the name tapes are for a KUZNYETSOV KV and LOKHOV AS.

    A captain would be a company commander; a “four-star” general (i.e., the top general) is far too high a rank to be commanding a motor rifle brigade/regiment – that would be a colonel or a maybe a one-star major general (brigadier in UK terms).

  • XC

    Are either the Russians or Ukranians a “race?” I wouldn’t have said so. If so, however, they are certainly a small slice of whatever “race” one is using to hurl epithets.

    In any case, as observed: “it’s poor war where no officers are killed”, anonymous junior officer.

    -XC

  • Fraser Orr

    Perry de Havilland (London): It is entirely possible to “blame Putin” whilst also observing that the culture from which he sprung is also a problem.

    It seems to me that Russian culture springs out of a thousand years of serfdom, namely that the people at the bottom have no control over what the people at the top do, and we should just drink vodka and tell depressing stories. A dear friend of mine is a Russian living in southern Russia and I have talked to him about this extensively. His view is one of both helplessness and shame. Shame that his country is doing this, and helplessness that he has no power to affect it.

    Putin came out of the culture of the KGB, not the general Russian population, and they are very different things. My friend is no more like, or culturally aligned with, Putin than a farm worker was with the Tsar. We can no more blame the Russian people (in fact we can blame them considerably less) for the invasion of Ukraine than you can blame me for the US invasion of Iraq (or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or Laos, or Grenada, or Panama or …)

  • A captain would be a company commander; a “four-star” general (i.e., the top general) is far too high a rank to be commanding a motor rifle brigade/regiment – that would be a colonel or a maybe a one-star major general (brigadier in UK terms).

    Yes, you would think so, but it seems Russian general officers have indeed been deployed down at BTG level in Ukraine, which some have speculated indicates a truly dire lack of lower level officers.

  • Patrick Crozier

    For comparison (and FWIW), in the course of the First World War Britain lost some 50 officers of Brigadier-General rank or above, or about one a month. It got so bad that (IIRC) in 1915 they were banned from entering the front line. Plenty still managed to get themselves killed even after that. The original British Expeditionary force of August 1914 was 5 divisions which I think translates to about 75,000 men which I believe is close to the size of the Russian army in Ukraine.

    PS. With a bit of googling I’ve got up a list. Turns out that the figure is 78 generals killed but only 3 in 1914. The Russians are in trouble.

  • which I think translates to about 75,000 men which I believe is close to the size of the Russian army in Ukraine

    I got the impression the Russians have about 190,000 in Ukraine, excluding Donbas paramilitaries.

  • Putin came out of the culture of the KGB, not the general Russian population, and they are very different things. My friend is no more like, or culturally aligned with, Putin than a farm worker was with the Tsar. We can no more blame the Russian people (in fact we can blame them considerably less) for the invasion of Ukraine than you can blame me for the US invasion of Iraq (or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or Laos, or Grenada, or Panama or …)

    A fair statement, but I think blaming Russian ‘culture’ is not quite the same as blaming every hapless Russian farmer or road sweeper for the Kremlin’s antics. As a Ukrainian chum of mine is wont to say, “Ukrainians understand Russians better that Russians understand Ukrainians because we’re the bit of Tsarist Russia that got westernised by various Tsars. And being westernised means not always thinking what the Tsar wants you to think.”

    Make of that what you will.

  • Fraser Orr

    Perry de Havilland (London)
    “Ukrainians understand Russians better that Russians understand Ukrainians because we’re the bit of Tsarist Russia that got westernised by various Tsars. And being westernised means not always thinking what the Tsar wants you to think.”

    I know you have friends and contacts in Ukraine, so you bring an interesting perspective. It has been a while now but I used to run two software teams in Ukraine, one in Kiev and one in Odessa, plus I have friends and contacts in Russia too. So it is interesting to see it from both sides. (Ukrainians as also Russians, seem to produce excellent programmers… no idea why.)

    BTW, not sure what the Beeb is doing but here in the US every newsreader and commenter insists on pronouncing the capital city’s name as “Keev”. Every Ukrainian I have ever talked to, and the ones you see interviewed on the news all pronounce it as “ki-ev” with two syllables (though the slavic vowels don’t map exactly to English vowels.) So I wonder how they all got stuck on this monosyllabic pronunciation.

  • Deep Lurker

    Are either the Russians or Ukranians a “race?”

    Back a century or two ago, “race” got used to describe not only the broad divisions it’s still used for today, but also much narrower ethnic distinctions, sometimes all the way down to a family lineage. So the “European race” got subdivided into the “English race,” the “French race,” the “German race,” the “Greek race,” etc. Which was connected to the idea of “the wogs begin at Calais.”

    So the Russians and Ukranians are different races in roughly the way that the English and the Scottish are different races. Someone from the 19th century might well describe them as such, without irony and without any thought of being controversial.

  • BTW, not sure what the Beeb is doing but here in the US every newsreader and commenter insists on pronouncing the capital city’s name as “Keev”.

    Yes, weird, my two closest Ukrainian chums (from Kharkiv & Dnipro respectively although I first met them in Kyiv) pronounce it… key-ev

  • Zerren Yeoville

    Presumably we would also have to find PG Wodehouse guilty of ‘Russophobia’ for the following quotation and its implicit criticism of the Russian cultural experience and the values it embodies:

    “Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”

    Then there is Ayn Rand’s dismissal of the culture and values of the land of her birth:

    “Who doesn’t hate failure? Should one love it? Is there a nation on earth that doesn’t hate it? Surely, one would have to say that failure is un-British or un-French or un-Chinese. I can think of only one nation to whom this would not apply: failure is not un-Russian (in a sense which is deeper than politics).”

    In short, as Perry de Havilland wrote above, “It is entirely possible to “blame Putin” whilst also observing that the culture from which he sprung is also a problem.”

  • So the Russians and Ukranians are different races in roughly the way that the English and the Scottish are different races. Someone from the 19th century might well describe them as such, without irony and without any thought of being controversial.

    This is more bizarre in terms of the current state of Ukraine & Russia than comparing Scots & English, given a big chunk of self-identifying Ukrainians actually speak… Russian.

    I am not criticising your perfectly reasonable comment, just contextualising it: imagine describing English & Scots as separate races but then imagine everyone north of Manchester who describes themselves as English nevertheless speaks like they come from Glasgow 😀

  • Snorri Godhi

    Perry’s friend:

    Ukrainians understand Russians better that Russians understand Ukrainians because we’re the bit of Tsarist Russia that got westernised by various Tsars.

    That’s interesting. I thought that St Petersburg would be the most westernized part of Tsarist Russia.

    And being westernised means not always thinking what the Tsar wants you to think.

    Is it so clear-cut though?
    Wasn’t Peter the Great both a westernizer and an autocrat?
    Weren’t slavophiles such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky somewhat diffident of authority?

  • Is it so clear-cut though?

    Of course not, my chum is speaking in cultural generalities.

  • Chester Draws

    That’s interesting. I thought that St Petersburg would be the most westernized part of Tsarist Russia.

    The most westernised bits of Tsarist Russia were Poland, Finland and the Baltics. There’s a reason they broke away and stayed away.

    The most westernised bits of the USSR was the far west of the Ukraine. After all it had been part of Austro-Hungary for a long time. It had an irredentist movement both in 1918-1921 and in 1941-1950.

  • Mr Ed

    The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, and his mathematician brother Richard were born in Lemburg, now Lviv aka Lvov in the far west of the Ukraine. It is one of those places where you could stand still over time as the borders move around you. It certainly has (or had) a fine historic core that is very Mitteleuropa. The buildings may fall and rise, and the people come and be driven out or killed, but perhaps the legacy of the past raises the people. The socialists probably think that buildings affect people, that is why so many are keen on Brutalism, to break the spirit.

  • Stonyground

    That was me when I first encountered Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition, The Great Gates Of Keev. I did of course learn later that it was pronounced key-ev.