EDITORIAL
Russia, purveyor to Terror
Russia proudly announced last week that it plans to deliver vast quantities of offensive weapons, including fighter jets and armored attack vehicles, to Syria, as well as defensive systems for nuclear technology it also plans to to hand over the the rogue regime in Damascus.
So Russia is a pipeline to Syria. That crazed dictatorship, of course, is itself a pipeline — to the Hezbollah terrorist organization which is committed to the destruction of one of America’s closest allies, Israel, as well as to the United States itself, no differently than Osama bin Laden. In fact, as Pajamas Media reports, Russia is even manufacturing covert weaponry which appears to have terrorists as its primary market.
We can’t help but wonder: How would Russia react if the United States decided to begin pumping dangerous offensive weapons into a country that was well known to be supplying the same weapons to the terrorist “bandits” of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia? Would Russians be inclined to say “that’s America’s right, it’s none of our concern?” Or would they be outraged and demand that the U.S. cease such actions immediately?
Let’s not forget what sort of nation we are dealing with here. Russian “president” Dima Medvedev recently declared that Russia would “act as its forefathers did when they met pirates” and then a group of pirates arrested by Russia suddenly, mysteriously, turned up dead. It appears for all the world that Russia executed them on the high seas without trial, then lied about it the same way it lied about fomenting the coup d’etat that drove out a pro-U.S. regime from Kyrgyzstan.
Would such a nation hesitate for a millisecond before providing weapons to terrorist organizations whose foes Russia despised? Would Russia care at all that the victims of such weapons might be innocent women and children? Would Russia pause even a moment to worry about its hypocrisy, its own exposure to terrorism, its own need for international support?
The answer to those questions is: Obviously not. Despite the shameless bowing and scraping of the Obama administration regarding a so-called “reset” of relations with Russia, the Putin dictatorship is barreling ahead with cold-war politics. It is seeking to annex Ukraine and Georgia, it is sending aid and comfort to America’s most despised foes and buzzing the American shoreline with nuclear bombers, and it is seeking to use its own brand of terrorism, based in energy exports, against Western Europe.
These are the results of Barack Obama’s “foreign policy” made without the slightest personal knowledge of Russia: Failure, disaster, and apocalypse. This American adminstration’s name will live in infamy.
La Russophobe 
My opinion is, and I hope I am right, that Russia has no attack jets and other military hardware for Syria or anybody else. I doubt if Russia’s defense plants can even produce such things.
The SU35BM is the greatest fighter on the planet. Being the only aircraft capable of seeing stealth targets and engaging them
http://www.deagel.com/Aircraft-Warners-and-Sensors/Irbis_a001800001.aspx
I’m sure Russia has enough to offer Syria especially as far as fighter jets go.
Blah blah blah, we have heard this before.
However, note that every time US made aircraft engage Russian made aircraft, from Korea, to Vietnam, Iran-Iraq war, Gulf War, NATO intervention in FY, etc, the Russian made aircraft get wiped from the skies.
The Russians always make loudmouth claims for their gear, but it is interesting that it never ever lives up to expectations.
what about the Mig-15’s in Korea, it was only after the more experienced air force squadrons were replaced with ‘green’ PVO units that the Americans were able to get the upper hand. The Mig-15 in the hands of an experienced pilot easily wiped the floor with the Saber, it had better rate of climb, better armament, higher ceiling, better high altitude performance, the only advantages the Sabers had were better sights and marginally better low altitude performance so had the Soviet high command kept the air force units in Korea for longer, the Americans with their Sabers would have been flushed down the drain.
However you do have a point in that generally the soviet/Russian official propaganda tends to overrate the merits of Russian made weaponry. However, it has to be said that practically everybody else does that; read the WWII memoirs of German generals and you’re left at a total loss as to how on earth did the Germans manage to lose in every single engagement they had to knocked out scores of T-34’s without losing a single one of their mighty Tigers and Panthers, or take a look at the official web site of the British armed forces and you’ll read that the SA-80 assault rifle and LSW are the best small arms system out there, it’s incredibly accurate, totally reliable and what not and no mention is made of the fact there’s no way it can be configured to fire from the left shoulder and that until HK upgraded all the SA-80 rifles in British inventory to the A2 standard it was plagued by all sorts of reliability issues.
More to the point, quality aside, the Russian military complex is still capable of manufacturing more or less adequate weapons. The SU-35B mentioned above is basically a design dating from the late 1970’s, it’s an upteenth upgrade of the venerable SU-27 airframe, probably they put some new, possibly French made, avionics into it this time, if the Americans supply Israel with Raptors, though, that should tip the balance in their favour.
Strategically, I think, the Medvedev/Putin administration are making a mistake with this deal, especially now after Obama’s ‘reset’
Well, the Russian pilots made it harder for the USAF jet jockeys, but they still had a favourable kill loss ratio against the Mig-15.
Several Russian WW2 aces were shot down by USAF F-86 Sabres.
A good comparison is as follows
Which was the better fighter, the Sabre or the MiG? As in most questions of this type, the answer is–it depends!
Throughout the Korean war, American intelligence on the capabilities of the MiG-15 was limited largely to Sabre pilots’ fleeting impressions of the Russian-built aircraft when they encountered it in combat. These impressions were reinforced by a description of a MiG-15 flown to Denmark in March of 1953 by a Polish defector, and also by the examination of a wrecked MiG salvaged from 17 feet of water off the North Korean coast in July of 1951.
On September 21, 1953, Lt. No Kum-Suk of the Korean People’s Armed Forces Air Corps defected to the South along with his MiG-15bis. This presented the USAF with its first flyable example of its MiG-15 opponent, and gave US intelligence the first chance to compare its initial impressions with actual flight test data. The MiG was dismantled and flown to Okinawa aboard a C-124 Globemaster. There, it was reassembled and flown by a crew of experienced test pilots including Maj. Gen. Albert B. Boyd, Major Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, and Capt H. E. Collins. The MiG was painted with USAF markings, and was assigned the fictitious serial number “616”, because Capt. Collins had used this same number on a plane he had once flown. The actual MiG serial number was 2015357. This aircraft was later flown to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Lt. No’s MiG-15bis is currently on display at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base Museum, painted in its original North Korean markings.
For comparison purposes, the data of the flight test are summarized in the following table. Included for comparison purposes are data for the F-86A, the F-86E, the F-86F-10, and the “6-3” wing F-86F-30.
MiG-15bis F-86A-5 F-86E-10 F-86F-10 F-86F-30 (6-3)
Wingspan (ft) 33.08 37.12 37.12 37.12 37.12
Wing Area (sq ft) 255 287.9 287.9 287.9 302.26
Length (ft) 36.27 37.54 37.54 37.54 37.54
Height (ft) 11.15 14.74 14.74 14.74 14.74
Wingsweep (deg) 42 35 35 35 35
Engine Klimov VK-1 J47-GE-13 J47-GE-13 J47-GE-27 J47-GE-27
Thrust (lb.s.t) 5950 5200 5200 5910 5910
Initial Climb Rate (ft/min) 10,100 7470 7250 9300 9300
Time to 20,000 ft (min) 2.5 4.0 5.2 5.2 5.9
Time to 30,000 ft (min) 4.9 8.0 9.2 8.3 8.3
Time to 40,000 ft (min) 5.5 18.0 19.3 16.0 16.0
Service Ceiling (ft) 51,500 48,000 47,200 48,000 48,000
Max Speed at Sea Level (mph) (ft) 668 679 679 688 695
Max Speed at 20,000 ft (mph) (ft) 635 635 642 645 655
Max Speed at 30,000 ft (mph) (ft) 619 613 617 622 628
Max Speed at 35,000 ft (mph) (ft) 610 601 601 608 611
Max Speed at 40,000 ft (mph) (ft) 600 595 596 603 606
Max Speed at 47,500 ft (mph) (ft) 575
Ferry Range with external tanks (mi) 1228 1052 1022 1317 1615
Takeoff Run Over 50-ft obstacle (ft) 2500 3660 3870 3925 4720
Empty Weight (lbs) 8633 10,093 10,681 10,840 10,890
Combat Weight (lbs) 11,070 13,791 14,255 14,857 14,981
Armament 1x37mm, 2x23mm 6×0.50in 6×0.50in 6×0.50in 6×0.50in
Rate of Fire (rpm) 450 (37mm), 650 (23mm) 1100×6 1100×6 1100×6 1100×6
Ammunition Capacity (rounds) 40 (37mm), 160 (23mm) 300×6 300×6 300×6 300×6
The test flights confirmed the initial impressions of combat pilots in Korea. The MiG-15 was faster than the F-86A and F-86E at altitudes above 30,000 feet, but slower at lower altitudes. Early F-86Fs were superior in speed to the MiG only up to 35,000 feet, whereas the “6-3” F-86Fs were faster than their MiG opponents all the way up to the Sabre’s service ceiling.
One of the primary advantages of the MiG over the Sabre was its 4000-foot advantage in service ceiling. It would often happen that F-86s would enter MiG Alley at 40,000 feet, only to find MiGs circling 10,000 feet above them. There was nothing that the Sabre pilots could do unless the MiGs decided to come down and do battle. The high-flying MiGs could pick the time and place of battle, and their higher speed at high altitudes enabled them to break off combat at will when things got too tight. Many a MiG escaped destruction by being able to flee across the Yalu where the Sabres were forbidden to pursue.
The Sabre was much heavier than the MiG and had a superior diving speed. Both the MiG and the F-86 could go supersonic in a dive, but the Sabre was much more stable than the MiG in the transonic speed regime. One way for a Sabre to shake a MiG sitting on its tail was for the F-86 pilot to open his throttle all the way up and go over into a dive, pulling its pursuer down to lower altitudes where the F-86 had a performance advantage. Above Mach 0.86, the MiG-15 suffered from severe directional snaking, which made the aircraft a poor gun platform at these high speeds. Buffeting in the MiG began at Mach 0.91, and a nose-up tendency initiated at Mach 0.93. The high-speed stability problems of the MiG-15 were so severe that it was not all that uncommon for a MiG to go into the transonic regime during an air battle, only to lose its entire vertical tail assembly during violent combat maneuvering. The rate of roll of the MiG was too slow, and lateral-directional stability was poor at high altitudes and speeds.
One of the most serious weaknesses of the MiG-15 was its tendency to go into uncontrollable spins, especially in the hands of inexperienced pilots. Many Sabre victories in Korea were scored without the F-86 pilots ever having to fire their guns–they merely forced their MiG opponents into spins from which their pilots could not recover. An experienced MiG pilot could get himself out of a spin, but the aircraft was somewhat unstable and lacked good stall warning properties.
The turning radius of the MiG was good, somewhat better than that of the F-86A, E and early F. However, this advantage was largely eliminated by the advent of the “6-3” wing of the later F-86F. The good turning radius of the MiG was compromised by poor stalling characteristics. These bad stalling characteristics could get a green MiG pilot into serious trouble during the stress of a dogfight, causing his fighter to suddenly stall, go into an uncontrollable spin, and fall out of the sky.
In contrast, the spinning characteristics of the Sabre were excellent, and gave most pilots no trouble at all. If the F-86 was forced into a spin, recovery was usually effected by simply neutralizing the controls.
The MiG-15 armament of one 37-mm N-37 cannon and two 23-mm NR-23 guns was designed for attacking bombers, and was not really intended for use against fighters. Forty rounds of 37-mm ammunition and 160 rounds of 23-mm ammunition were carried, a rather low ammunition capacity. The 37-mm gun fired at a rate of 450 rpm, whereas the 23-mm guns each fired at a rate of 650 rpm. The MiG’s armament had a good punch, but the rate of fire was too slow to make it effective against nimble, rapidly-maneuvering fighters. In contrast, the F-86’s armament of six 0.50-in machine guns had a rapid firing rate and the aircraft carried an ample supply of ammunition. However, the machine guns of the Sabre lacked the stopping power of the MiG’s cannon. It was not uncommon for a Sabre pilot to empty all 1600 rounds of his ammunition at a MiG, only to see it escape unscathed.
The gunsight of the MiG-15 was of the simple gyro type, similar to that of the early F-86A. It lacked any radar ranging capability. The radar ranging gunsight of the later Sabres made the F-86 a much more accurate gun platform than the MiG, but this accuracy was sometimes wasted because of the low weight of fire from the machine guns.
The MiG was much lighter than the Sabre, weighing only 11,070 pounds loaded. The take off run to clear a 50-foot obstacle was only 2500 feet, as compared with 3660 feet for the F-86A.
Internal fuel capacity of the MiG was 372 US gallons, compared with 435 gallons for the Sabre. This gave the MiG a range of 480 miles, which could be increased to 675 miles with drop tanks.
During the Korean War, 792 MiG-15s were destroyed by F-86 pilots, with 118 probables being claimed. 78 Sabres were definitely lost in air-to-air combat against the MiGs, with a further 13 Sabres being listed as missing in action. This is about a ten-to-one superiority. From this result, one might naturally conclude that the F-86 was the superior fighter. However, a factor which must also be considered is the relative level of experience and competence of the opposing pilots. The US Sabre pilots were all highly trained and competent airmen, many of whom had extensive World War 2 combat experience. With the exception of some Russian World War 2 veterans who flew MiG fighters in Korea, the MiG pilots were often sent into combat with only minimal flying experience. MiG pilots often exercised poor combat discipline. During the course of battle, MiG pilots would often break off into confusion and panic, firing wildly, and leaving their wingmen unprotected. Often, a MiG pilot in trouble would eject from his plane before anyone actually shot at him. Many MiG pilots were so inexperienced that in the heat of battle they would end up getting themselves into uncontrollable spins and crashing. At times, MiG pilots would fire their cannon in an attempt to lighten their loads, without really aiming at anything. Most of the MiG pilots were extremely wary of combat, and usually did not attempt to fight unless they saw an advantage opening up. In contrast, the Sabre pilots were aggressive and eager for combat, and wanted nothing more than for the MiGs to come over the Yalu so that they could add to their scores.
So, which plane would you rather be sitting in, the MiG-15 or the F-86? Perhaps Chuck Yeager said it best–“It isn’t the plane that is important in combat, it’s the man sitting in it.”
http://www.joebaugher.com/usaf_fighters/p86_11.html
That is because
1.) Russia exports downgraded variants of it’s top models.
2.) In most of these wars the aircraft were not even built in Russia.
3.) They were generally used by poorly qualified pilots.
4.) Similarly, the support the aircraft would require such as ground radar and jamming is also crewed by inferior soldiers.
5.) American soldiers are simply better than some peasants from third world nations.
Well, given that most Russian servicemen are peasants from a 3rd world nation….
Actually in both Korea and Vietnam, Soviet technicians controlled the SAM systems, GCI (Ground Controlled Intercept) systems, and in many cases flew the jets too.
Didn’t help much.
In addition they did the same thing for Egypt and Syria, and in both 67 and 73 they failed abysmally.
This is not to say that aircraft like the MiG-21 were bad, they were good indeed, but not good enough.
As for the myth that the aircraft exported to Egypt and Vietnam were “downgraded”, that is simply a myth.
Keep in mind we’re talking about aircraft here, I wouldn’t want to fight the obviously one sided (In Russia’s favor) argument about air defense. Really? Korea air defense was ww2 era, so I’ll give you that one, you had better ww2 era air defense.
As for Vietnam, the NVA and China lost fewer than 300 aircraft and 100-200 SAMs, USA lost over 5000 aircraft including 3000 helicopters. And you still lost! I don’t see how it didn’t help much. Further more, the aerial kill ratio in the early war was 0.9 to 1 in favor of Vietnam! And not a single Russian pilot served there, know that one for sure! Eventual victory was brought soley by training and the development of advanced tactics, with which the USA simply out-thought the Vietnamese who were plowing fields only weeks before ending up KIA. So congradulations.
As for 73 and 67? 67 can be attributed to Operation Focus, in which the Egyptians could not even lift off due to Israeli cratering weapons use on their airfields, and lost over half their air force which formed to bulk of arab air forces, on which they relied like man relies on water. 73 is mixed.
2 Israeli F-4s with no casualties defeated 27 Mig-21, downing 11 before the rest retreated.
At the same time Egypt used 64 Mig-17 and 21 to kill 20 out of 120 F–4s launched at them losing only 3 aircraft.
You should be able to see how, if alone, both examples could be used to proclaim victory for those planes, this is why combat is an ineffective basis on which to prove a point. In my opinion, when used in conjunction with proper training, proper tactics and intent, Russian fighter air craft are better as tests and some examples of combat have proven (though once again, efficiency in combat often times proves more the strength of the man behind the wheel than the car).
And if you honestly think Russia is a third world country, theres no point in me arguing with an idiot and Russophobe, simply because you won’t be able to accept the facts and proof I present to you.
Well, sorry bucko, but in terms of air to air combat the USAF & USN were able to achieve F-4 vs VPAF Migs a kill loss ratio of 3.25 to 1 in the early part of the war 1965-70, and the F-8 vs VPAF Migs achieved a rate of 6-1, hardly the 0.9-1 you claim.
Meanwhile the USAF achieved an air to air kill loss ratio of 3.93 to 1 against VPAF Migs using F-4’s and the F-105’s which were strike aircraft, not interceptors or dogfighters still managed to achieve 2.02 to 1 against the VPAF while performing bombing missions. These figures are for the period 1965-1970.
For the USN in the second part of the air war over North Vietnam 1972-73, the kill loss ratio massivelyimproved to an excellent 12.5 to 1.
The majority of USAF & USN losses were actually caused by radar directed AAA (anti-aircraft-artillery) and small arms fire.
The overall (all aircraft types including bombers, helicopters, recce and fighters) kill loss ratio for air to air combat over North Vietnam was 195 VPAF Migs lost against 77 US aircraft of all types, being a 2.53 to 1 ratio in favor of the US.
The North Vietnamese air defence system was the most advanced Soviet tech of the day, and was directed by Soviet “advisors”, one of the reasons the US was so hesitant to bomb them in the early part of the war.
As for the 1973 war, once again, the vast overwhelming majority of IDF/AF losses were to AAA & SAM’s.
The IDF still maintained a huge kill loss ratio over the Arab air forces, which was one of the reasons the Egyptians gave up in disgust their dependence on Soviet equipment and cozied up to the yanks. The Arabs lost 277 aircraft in air to air combat, the Israeli’s lost 5 in air to air combat, a ratio of 55.4 to 1 in the IDF/AF’s favor. So I suspect you are telling porkies when you refer to the Egyptian Mig’s shooting down 20 F-4’s
The ratio becomes even better when the Bekaa valley operation of the 80’s is taken into account, the Israeli’s attained an incredible 82-0 kill loss ratio that time, against the Soviet supplied Syrians.
Far from being “peasants” the pilots that flew in the Arab and North Vietnamese Air Forces were brave, and also highly trained in Soviet doctrines by Russian training teams, and often in the USSR, they operated on a principle of strict GCI (Ground Controlled Intercept) , and in the case of North Vietnam, had the advantage of operating against predictable ingress and egress routes that were the same day after day, against the US forces that were forced to fight with one hand tied behind their back due to politics back home.
By early part of the war I meant the first year. At the height of the war the kill ration was 2.95 to 1 in favor of USA. And accounting for SAM technicians, pilots and everyone death in the air war the death ratio reported by a study in the Vietnamese government is 2.03 Americans for 1 Vietnaman.
If you don’t believe me about the El Mansoura air battle look it up on google or read a book about it. It marks the national Egyptian air force day.
@5.) American soldiers are simply better than some peasants from third world nations.
Like Russia.
@3.) They were generally used by poorly qualified pilots.
Just like in modern Russia:
As early as 1989, a reduction in Russia’s military training activity became obvious in CSCE reports of major training exercises. This means that by 1996 the armed forces had passed through more than ten cycles without conducting any serious training.
Considering the Russian military five-year personnel assignment cycle, the training hiatus means that there was one, and part of another, military generation in each rank with a serious training deficiency, or no training at all in their nominal assignments. There were platoon and company commanders with no field experience. Few battalion, regimental, and division commanders had practical experience in commanding troops in the field at their present or preceding level.
The air forces of the Russian Federation are the most technologically sensitive of the armed forces. Modern high-performance aircraft demand skilled crews to operate and maintain them. However, in 1995 General Deynekin reported receiving only 30 percent of required funding for fuel, equipment, and parts in 1995–a shortfall that cut pilot flight time in operational squadrons to thirty to forty hours per year, approximately three hours per month in the cockpit. By contrast, the United States standard for pilot proficiency is 180 to 260 hours per year.
http://www.mongabay.com/history/russia/russia-military_schools.html
And in 2009:
[Russian Air Force (VVS) commander-in-chief, Colonel-General Aleksandr] Zelin admitted that young lieutenants currently fly an average of 20-30 hours annually, while they are faced with the prospect of serving in remote bases on no more than 15,000-20,000 rubles (US$628) annually.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/KH22Ag01.html
I read the part where you called Russia a 3rd world nation, laughed.
I saw your comment on Russian pilots, laughed.
Then I saw 1995 and stopped reading. I don’t mind a good laugh at an idiotic Russophobe, but when you try to back up total blasphemy with utter lies, it stops being funny. Russian contract pilots receive 10,000 rubles monthly and receive 70-120 flight hours annually. Perhaps a conscript lieutenant serving on Novoya Zemliya applies to the statistics you described, but most certainly not the average Russian pilot or technician.
And the articles you presented to me, most notably the second one, practically lay out the blueprints for the future of the strongest force in Eurasia. New planes, new systems, perhaps you should read about how they’ve been proven to beat everything thrown against them.
When you have a more enlightened view on today’s military situation, I hope you don’t come back to this site.
Well, the Russian air forces didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory during August 2008.
Exactly how many of the massively outnumbered Georgian SU-25’s did they manage to shoot down?
None, zero, zip, nada.
And due to the Georgians effective use of SAM’s the Russians lost quite a few aircraft, including SU-24 Fencers, SU-25’s and even a TU-22m Backfire….
In fact it was even worse than it at first appears:
The performance of the Russian armed forces during the invasion of Georgia in August showed the dismal state of Moscow’s military machine. Some Russian soldiers went into battle wearing athletic shoes because there were not enough boots to go around. Russian troops stole everything they could lay hands on–particularly from the Georgian army facilities they overran. Uniforms, beds, U.S.-supplied Humvees, and toilets were even pulled off the walls by Russian forces. “They had everything; the most amazing f–ing beds, amazing f–ing barracks with sealed windows,” one Russian soldier was recorded saying in a short mobile phone video that was later broadcast–awestruck like Goldilocks when she stumbled upon Baby Bear’s boudoir. Apparently living conditions for soldiers have improved little in the decades since Belenko’s defection.
Russian forces were able to overcome Georgian forces because of sheer numbers, but in air operations the Russians had their proverbial head handed to them. A total of 12 Russian aircraft were lost to Georgian air defense units, including one Tupolev Tu-22M Backfire bomber. By the time hostilities ceased Russian pilots were being offered lavish bonus payments if they were willing to fly missions over Georgia, and still some of them turned the offers down, preferring to stay on the ground where it was safe.
The loss of the Tu-22M is symptomatic of the deep and pervasive ills of Russia’s military machine. There were no operational pilots with enough hours to fly the mission, so instructor pilots had to be press-ganged into service–only two of whom were able to eject safely. The fact that the aircraft–a medium-range strategic bomber that was originally designed to carry nuclear weapons–was misused for a reconnaissance mission is another source of embarrassment.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/821gzfgw.asp
None, zero, zip, nada.
Er, did I ever called you an idiot?:D
Sunshine, fnakly, you sound like a good-natured boy most of the time. I do not like to repeat “you are an idiot” when I have to speak to you. But seriously, you should look for numbers and exact facts – you should double-check whatever “Imedi”disseminates.
You should stop reading trash. Russia lost 4 aircraft and destroyed 12 Georgian aircraft in the air, 18 on the ground and over 25 SAM sites. 1 Su-25 was lost to a Georgian SAM, a Tu-22 was running a BOMBING RUN and was shot when returning home. Another Su-25 and Su-24 were destroyed by IGLA-2 rockets fired from Russian soldiers who had mistaken them for Georgian craft. This is still however horrible performance (for a country like Russia) which is now repaired by new military infrastructure/communications and doctrine which will have effectively stopped the loss of the planes destroyed by friendly fire. This will have gives the VVS a kill ratio of 9.5 to 1 in favor of Russia. And without the friendly fire losses 18 to 1.
This is the official report of the Russian air force delivered 1 month after the war by ITAR-TASS.
@and destroyed 12 Georgian aircraft in the air
Really? Cool. Now show me the Georgian pilots (dead or captured) to prove your fantasy.
Like, you know, the Georgians showed the dead and captured Russian pilots. Or like the Russians showed the dead and captured Georgian ground forces troops. (Including this video of this missing Georgian special forces soldier being tortured to death.)
@a Tu-22 was running a BOMBING RUN
The Tu-22, which was first designed to carry nuclear weapons, was flying a reconnaissance mission, Russian officials said. Former Russian air force chief Gen. Anatoly Kornukov said this was a mistake.
“They sent the Tu-22 crew to their deaths thinking that the Georgian air defense would mount no resistance,” Kornukov told Interfax news agency.
Alexander Golts, a Moscow-based independent military analyst, agreed.
“Using the Tu-22 for a reconnaissance mission over Georgia was the same as using a microscope to drive nails,” he said.
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/09/airforce_georgia_uav_091608/
@This is still however horrible performance (for a country like Russia)
No, this is just a standard performance for a horrible country like Russia.
@This is the official report of the Russian air force delivered 1 month after the war by ITAR-TASS.
This is the official report delivered by ITAR-TASS… on a BOMBING RUN ! :D
Really? Cool. Now show me the Georgian pilots (dead or captured) to prove your fantasy.
Er, no, we didn’t actually shot them down. All the mighty planes are just not in Georgia after the war – they left for Iraq mission, yes. That’s why Georgia does not have any military aviation inside it’s own borders.
Their air forces were, er, “abolished” after the war.
The structure and information on air forces is, er, “temporarily unavailable” for the last year on the GMD site – for the same reason.
That’s all because they are fighting in Iraq! No filthy Russians shot a single brave Georgian jet – valiant guys pilots just flew away, right?
Alright, you said no Georgian Su-25 was shot down, right? Nada?
Thats 6 right there. And there are much more not on video. Still, already outnumbers by 3 the number of Russian planes lost to Georgian fire. And by 6 the number of Russian pilots lost to Georgian fire.
By the way. I’ve been looking for hours now and I finally found a source which proves the Tu22M3 was used for a bombing run, though it is not the one I originally read.
Click to access the_tanks_of_august_sm.pdf
Enjoy it.
I can’t show you any pictures because I don’t have any but you seem content to believe sources which have no access to this, but I can not provide you with any images, since in the heat of battle you don’t really wander off to a crash site to take pictures, especially when it’s in enemy territory.
@The Russian bomber was conducting a top secret bombing mission, who’s existence was only announced a month after the war by ITAR TASS (confirmed by the actual chief Zelin), it was told to the media that it was running a reconnaissance mission, and you so easily believed it.
Honestly, if Russia had 3 reconnaissance battalions in Georgia, why should we have used the Tu22 for reconnaissance?
And the gazette made a report on the military’s performance in the war, it included 2 paragraphs about the bombing run, so no there wasn’t an entire article dedicated to it.
Ron wrote: “China and Japan are both engaging in reckless financial actions.”
Absolutely. China’s lending money to the US government and buying US bonds is an irresponsible behavior. It’s like giving drugs to an addict. Any money the US government borrows – it will never pay back. Instead it will spend it to support its multi-trillion “habits”: wasting $trillions on wars, weapons, Wall Street bonuses, foreign oil companies like BP and ExxonMobil.
OK, OK, BP and ExxonMobil are not “foreign” when it comes to buying up American politicians to wage wars on their behalf and pollute our waters. They are foreign only when it comes to paying our taxes:
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/04/06/exxon-tax/
ExxonMobil paid no federal income tax in 2009. (Updated)
exxon-mobilLast week, Forbes magazine published what the top U.S. corporations paid in taxes last year. “Most egregious,” Forbes notes, is General Electric, which “generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.” Big Oil giant Exxon Mobil, which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS:
Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas.
Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein notes that, despite benefiting from corporate welfare in the U.S., Exxon complains about paying high taxes, claiming that it threatens energy innovation research. Pat Garofalo at the Wonk Room notes that big corporations’ tax shelter practices similar to Exxon’s shift a $100 billion annual tax burden onto U.S. taxpayers. In fact, in 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that “two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005.”
———
So, when the Republicans told us that the $hundreds of billions wasted on the war on Iraq will be compensated by the extra taxes that the oil companies will pay to us on their greatly increased profits – they lied. The tax benefits go the Cayman Islands instead. Maybe the Cayman Islands boys should die in oil wars instead of American boys?
What do you mean “any money the US government borrows – it will never pay back.” How do you know that? The bond market does not think so. The U.S. Government never defaulted on any debt in history. And the credit history is a big deal.
Unlike you beloved motherland, which defaulted at least twice
How do you know that? The bond market does not think so.
The bond market does not think.
And the credit history is a big deal.
Oh, so what happens if dollar would lose 90% of it’s value? Would this count as a default?
Always smell BS when I read Russian government blurbs in the news: They are going to sell gas to China, they are going into outer space and divert an asteroid, etc. There is no end to it. Always they are going to do something that is expensive and difficult.
The last time they shot off a shipboard rocket it went out of control and frightened the Swedes.
I see a Russia that is financially on the rocks and with very inadequate leadership.
Russia’s not necessarily broke, the deal with these high profile projects, which by the way also include the Olympics, is that they provide a nice front for allocating huge amounts of cash which then those at the trough help themselves to. After a while the vast majority of these projects either stop being mentioned and eventually get forgotten about by the public or are officially abandoned. It’s a way of money laundering, government style.
It is not only the Russians who are having financial trouble. The whole world is having difficulties because of feckless government actions. China and Japan are both engaging in reckless financial actions.
Europe looks like they are coming apart caused by the Greeks and other losers who keep spending.
The US, of course, has the incompetent democrats running up debts. So it is basically the whole world that has gone mad.
And now we have shale gas beating up on the energy producers. There is no end to it.
The whole world could easily end up with a richly deserved depression.
So it is hardly surprising that the Russians would also be making themselves look rediculous.
Ron
Well said, trouble is that Putin’s soviet communist fascist ruSSia, works on the principle of “do as I say and not as I do”. Plus they, Putin and Medvedev, outdo each other in the stupid lies they dream up.
Just you wait and see, their sales to Damascus will be all obsolete hardware. As a mild guess they are at least 20 years behind the eight ball when one compares Putin’s so called ‘paradise’ to the United States of America in military hardware and technology.
With Putin, or Medvedev for that purpose, words are cheap. Just look at the hot air about the proposed gas pipeline to China. A country that has bypassed them and built a special pipeline from Turkmenistan direct to China, and at a much cheaper gas price then Putin was prepared to offer them. Then to add insult to injury Turkmenistan, which has one of the largest gas deposits in the world, has demanded a price increase for all the gas that they supply to Russia, as the latter only adds on their exorbitant mark up to arrive at an overpriced product, which they then charge (read ‘slug’) to the buyer. The only exception that I know off at the moment is the special price, Putin has given Ukrainian’s Yanukovych as an act of “brotherly love”.
Do you think at all before you post these rants, or do you pretty much just let it rip, sense be damned? When was the last time Syria attacked the U.S. using fighter planes? Armoured vehicles? That’s right, never.
And if you’re worried about Syria squaring off against your bestest pal, Israel, I wouldn’t. The U.S. gives Israel $3 Billion in grants every year, since 1985
Click to access RL33222.pdf
which probably helps Israel post a GDP nearly double that of Syria, and sells Israel its most advanced defense systems which they “buy” using U.S. taxpayers’ money.
U.S. weapons sales in 2009 accounted for better than 70% of global arms sales combined: the biggest customer – the United Arab Emirates. U.S. meddling in the Middle East fuels and radicalizes extremist Wahhabism, which inspires terrorist attacks worldwide such as the recent subway bombing in Moscow and the London bus bombings in 2005.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5895G620090910
FSB, you are a moron, the only thing that encouraged the Moscow metro bombing was Russian state terror in the Caucasus.
Are you really such a complete retard that you believe anything else?
Andrew, you are a moron, the only thing that encouraged the London metro bombing was British state terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Are you really such a complete retard that you believe anything else?
And Iraq and Afghanistan are not even in Britain, you retard!
So you agree that the Moscow metro bombing was caused by Russian state terror in the Caucasus!
Excellent!!
So you agree that the 9/11 bombing was caused by CIA helping Bush to become reelected in 2004!
Excellent!!
Gosh, you’re dumb…
An emphatic no, no, and no, Dimitry, it is you that is the moron! why? because you don’t tell us about all the countless bombings in Chechnya that happen against your beloved employer the soviet communist fascist RuSSian oppressors that are occupying this nation. But instead, in classic KGB fashion, you steer to one solitary big terrorist bombing in the UK.
And than you have the temerity to say that “Iraq and Afghanistan are not even in Britain,”. Now that was indeed an intelligent thing to say not. Be good enough to tell where in the hell Chechnya is, in regard to your beloved fascist RuSSia? and why so many moslems are sacrificing their lives to kill your beloved Kremlin occupiers in an attempt to get them out of their country?
Rage against the world out there Bohdan, wipe them all, crush and destroy.
Or just get back to school.
Dimwit DimiTry.
What a dolt and liar you are! you pathetic FSB employed stooge.
Go on goon, just quote one of my statements, where I’m supposed to be raging “against the world”, or for that matter “wipe them all, crush and destroy.”
Come on you KGB (currently FSB) soviet faschist lying goon! Just one example? just one!
As a point of interest! the country that I have resided in for the last several decades, and am a proud citizen of, ‘FSB’ stands for “F*cken Stupid Bastard”, and is only verbally issued to someone that is the lowest of the low. Wear the mantle proudly, you certainly deserve it, you pathetic liar.
Now be a good Ka Ge Bist and firstly wipe the froth of your mouth and secondly return to taking your medications.
Sunshine, your support of Andrew in this thread does not make him a good service:)
By the way NO NAME modern aircraft to not have a pilot. For the Americans some guy in Alabama flies five pilotless aircraft all by himself. You get a lot of firepower on the scene very cheap because you do not have expensive systems needed to save a pilot. Our aircraft carriers will be changing their role soon.
Pilotless air travel IS way of the future. You already have to pay for luggage and soon for toilet (on Irish Airlines). Next year, you will have to pay extra to get a human pilot to take off, and separately – to land.
Dear ladies and gentlemen, the captain says goodbye and wishes you a pleasant flight:)
Well, it seems that Voice Of Retardation is not up to play on the latest in military tech (not surprising given that he is a moron).
The Navy’s Fighter-Plane-Size UAV, the X-47B, Is Unveiled in California
Yesterday at its Palmdale, Calif., manufacturing facility, Northrop Grumman unveiled its first completed X-47B Navy Unmanned Combat Air System. This giant UAV could soon be one of the most lethal unmanned aircraft in the U.S. military.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/4296188
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-47B
Andrew,
You are a Georgian. You don’t have to pay for all these boondoggles that we, the American taxpayers, have to pay for.
“This giant UAV could soon be one of the most lethal unmanned aircraft in the U.S. military.”
One of the most lethal, but not the most lethal? So, what is the most lethal, and why can’t we just continue to manufacture it? Not expensive enough?
Well, the USAF has its own program, the USN has its own program, the US Army has its own program, and I suspect the USMC has its own program.
Different services have different requirements, the last defence secretary who tried to shoehorn them into common programs was Robert McNamara, and it was a disaster.
I presume Chinese won’t have a chance to pass the next issue of the US state bonds, would they?
I’m am so loving this blog purely out of entertainment value. I’m sure a lot of Russians and non-Russians who have sense find this quite amusing. It’s like watching Glen Beck ranting.
Thanks for confirming you find it funny that Russia is providing weapons to terrorist organizations who will use them to kill innocent American women and children. You remind our readers of a point we failed to make in this editorial, namely that the people of Russia support the outrageous misconduct of their government and therefore fully deserve to be blamed and suffer for it.
But in the wider context, it’s strange you would find facts like Russia being #3 in the world in suicides and not in the top 130 countries in the world for life expectency to be entertaining. We’d think a person who actually liked his country would find that horrifying, and want to take action to change things, as we recommend.
But we understand why you hate your own country so much, since it tortures its citizens so relentelessly. Which is why more Russians commit suicide than almost any other country on the planet, and why Russia doesn’t rank in the top 50 countries for per capita GDP. Who would want to give their best efforts to a nation that is such a mess?
Most of the top 8 in the suicide list are countries that were enslaved and occupied by the kremlin. The kremlin’s russian occupiers are committing suicide in their neighboring countries also. Maybe the russians that are living there are beginning to find out how many of their neighbors were tortured and murdered, by the kremlin and decided to commit suicide?
Sure, and this also fully applies to Japan and Guyana that are in top 8. Tell me also why Kyrgyzstan (enslaved and occupied by the Kremlin, in your terminology) has lower suicide rate (rank 52) than the US (rank 40).
Retard.
Mots funny is that the number one state of terror hypocritically accuses in terrorism other countries. In Russian, you call this “В чужом глазу соринку видим, в своем бревна не замечаем”. But the worst of all is that the US, against all international laws, transferred nuclear weapon technologies to other terrorist states like Israel and Pakistan.
Oh OSR! “other terrorist states like Israel and Pakistan”? how about giving actual examples of their terrorist acts rather then your official soviet fascist propaganda.
And before you jump to any stupid and irrelevant conclusions, no! I am not a fan of either country that you have mentioned in your spiel.
Explaination: Russians hate the Jews (and Israel), and the most recent official myth is the “foreign mercenaries” are coming to Russia from Pakistan. Instead of Dagestan.
Here’s “president” Medvedev recently lying to the American public about Umalat Magomedov, the husband Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova and (like her) the native of Dagestan:
MEDVEDEV: That woman is virtually a child. She’s just 17. But she has taken the decision for herself which brought the deaths of many people. Why? That’s the main question. Why? She grew up in the Caucasus region. As far as I understand, if I correctly see what you’re showing me this is a lady who married one of the bandits. He is a foreign mercenary. He came to Russia in order to fight for his very doubtful ideals. He was killed. And according to the version which today is maintained by the investigation, this woman was one of those that triggered the explosive. Why did she do it? Why did she do that to innocent people? Evidently there’s multiple reasons. First one is radicalism. Extremist nature., which is typical for many people arriving from abroad which are fighting against our government and against many other countries in international terrorism. The same people are in Afghanistan, Pakistan. We’re constantly catching people of such a breed, or we destroy them. And after we check their documents we find that they are from far away lands. But this woman, she’s from Russia. She’s married to one of those bandits. And after he was killed, she made the decision to retaliate. But to retaliate on common people. What’s the way to fight it? You can fight it only after you understand how to remove the reasons for it. You know how difficult it is to fight terrorism. It’s difficult in Russia and in America. In order to fight such activity, you have to change the psychology of the people. You can create normal life conditions in the Caucusus. You have to destroy all of those who came here for terrorism. Those people are infiltrating through the borders.
STEPHANOPOULOS: From Afghanistan, from Pakistan.
MEDVEDEV: From Afghanistan, Pakistan.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/transcript-george-stephanopoulos-interviews-russian-president-dmitry-medvedev/story?id=10348116&page=2
Oh OSR! “other terrorist states like Israel and Pakistan”? how about giving actual examples of their terrorist acts rather then your official soviet fascist propaganda.
@“bandits” of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia
Neverending Russian Peace daily update – yesterday:
At Least Seven Killed In North Caucasus Violence
May 18, 2010
Russian officials say at least seven people have been killed in separate clashes between Russian-backed troops and militants across the North Caucasus.
In Chechnya, three members of the security forces reportedly were shot dead in their cars and three civilians were injured in separate ambushes.
In Daghestan, two police officers and two militants were killed in firefights.
Also, in Ingushetia, militants blew up a gas pipeline, though no one was injured.
Islamist militants across the North Caucasus have been fighting Russian forces for years, some with the aim of establishing an independent Islamic state.
http://www.rferl.org/content/At_Least_Seven_Killed_In_North_Caucasus_Violence/2045925.html
The 3 killed in Chechnya included the chief of the notorious ORB-2 torture squad.
About ORB-2 in February 2010:
http://www.iwpr.net/report-news/chechens-suffer-torture-%E2%80%9Chell%E2%80%9D
In December 2006, a court ordered the acquittal and release from custody of Ali Techiev, who had been accused of taking part in an armed attack by militants on Grozny on August 21, 2004.
The court was persuaded by evidence provided by Techiev’s lawyer that the accused had been tortured and interrogated illegally.
Techiev was snatched by masked men who turned out to be Russian federal security forces on November 28, 2005 and held in Operational Investigation Bureau No. 2 (known in Russian as ORB-2) where he claims he was subjected to brutal torture.
Techiev wrote a statement for Memorial in which he said that he had been abused so badly that his health was broken. His sight had deteriorated, his kidneys and liver had been damaged, two ribs were broken. He frequently loses consciousness and experiences pain in his chest.
“The torture is confirmed by the medical analysis carried out for the court and the fact that he now has invalid status,” said Techiev’s lawyer, Zalina Takhajieva.
Takhajieva went on, “While Techiev was being held in pre-trial detention he was regularly taken to interrogations in ORB-2 where he was beaten and threatened that he or members of his family would be killed if he did not confess to crimes he had not committed.”
“I was brought to a point of physical and moral exhaustion,” wrote Techiev. “I lost all sense of time and completely lost any sense of pain or reality.”
The issue of torture is now high on the agenda for the Council of Europe’s anti-torture agency, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, CPT – even though the authorities deny it takes place at all.
A cruise missile in a shipping box on sale to rogue bidders
Defence experts are warning of a new danger of ballistic weapons proliferation after a Russian company started marketing a cruise missile that can be launched from a shipping container.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/7632543/A-cruise-missile-in-a-shipping-box-on-sale-to-rogue-bidders.html
Oh. That means you can’t just bomb them to the stone age in Venesuela.
That means you need to destroy virtually every train in the country before the USS Nimitz can get into a 100 miles zone from the Venezuela shores.
That means bad news…
Boris, “ballistic weapons proliferation” was cool. Please, keep on writing more.
Boris goes ballistic.
Andrew, your frequent digressions into crudity and gratuitous rudeness force me to downgrade you from gentleman to semi-pillock.
Click to access Yemelianova.pdf
“By the second half of the 1990s, representatives of official Islam publicly admitted that salafi (Wahhabi) ideas had penetrated local Muslim communities…in the North Caucasus, the proliferation of Islamic fundamentalism, which has been widely known as Wahhabism, began in the late 1980s and in Azerbaijan in the early 1990s….Among the means by which Islamic fundamentalism has been promoted from abroad have been the participation of local Muslims in the hajj (annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina) and the activities of various Saudi and other Middle Eastern Islamic organisations and foundations in the region. The latter subsidised construction of mosques and madrassas, the hajj of local Muslims, as well as scholarships for those local young Muslims who wanted to study in Islamic universities and colleges abroad. Foreign Islamic foundations also supplied teachers for newly opened Islamic schools and colleges, assisted in the establishment of Islamic publishing houses and freely distributed Qur’ans and other Islamic literature, including those of fundamentalist nature. They also invested in the proselytising activities which were conducted by Islamic missionaries and in the organisation of various Islamic training courses and camps, most of which were located in Chechnya.”
“Wahhabis perceive the jihad as the core of Islam, without which it is like a ‘lifeless corpse’. Unlike the tariqatists who interpret the jihad predominantly in terms of the spiritual self-perfection of a Muslim, Wahhabis believe that the jihad also implies a
campaign to spread Islam all over the world.”
…Part 2:
There’s no argument that the Chechen wars aggravated the situation, although both sides are credited with atrocities; for my part, I believe Russia would have been better off to simply let Chechnya go.
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=40490
Its tribal factions have a long history of conflict, and would have been fighting each other in no time. “Ancient rivalries and resentments among peoples of the Caucasus, rooted in ethnic consciousness and territorial claims, were only suppressed, not mitigated, by communism. In some instances they were intensified. They re-emerged with a vengeance as Soviet power waned and collapsed. Though religion sometimes plays a role in these, it is almost always a subordinate factor.”
Click to access Henze_Islam_NorthCaucasus.pdf
However, although the Caucasus has been predominantly Muslim for centuries, the rise of radical Islamic teachings such as Wahhabism is new, and originates from the Middle East. My point is the origin of radical Islam in the Caucasus, not its inspiration.
Click to access islam98.pdf
“It was this radical fringe that established the “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against
the Jews and the Crusaders” in February 1998, headed by Saudi dissident Usama bin
Ladin. This body issued religious edicts, pitting Islam and the West against each other,
thereby reinforcing not only the dichotomy between Islam and the West but the polarity within Islamist movements. The bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in August, which were attributed to Bin Ladin’s Islamic Front, and the American retaliation, put radical Islam in the limelight and elevated the issues of terrorism and counter-terrorism on the agenda of Western as well as Arab governments.
One of the main tenets of Islamist movements, Sunni as well as Shi‘i, was the struggle
against the West, its culture and values, a struggle that was an integral part of their
supranational agenda….. The final part of the declaration was a fatwa attributed to Bin Ladin, who had assumed the title of shaykh in order to acquire the right to issue such religious rulings. The edict held that “to kill Americans and their allies, both civilians and military, was an individual duty (fardh ‘ayn) of every Muslim,” anywhere and at any time, until the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the holy mosque in Mecca were liberated and until their armies departed from all the lands of Islam.”
Asymmetric violence such as car bombs, suicide bombers and the deliberate targeting of civilian centres is not only a new tactic for the region, but is the hallmark of radical Islam. Doku Umarov, the most likely suspect for the Moscow Subway bombings, styles himself the “Amir of Mujahideen in Caucasus” and the region as the “Caucasian Emirate”. The connection seems pretty clear to me.
Actually, the Chechens were around half Christian until the mid 19th century.
Funnily enough, exposure to Russia forced them into the arms of Islam in a desperate attempt to avoid extermination during the bloody Russian invasions of the 19th century.
Nice to see you are showing some intelligence, but not only will Russia never let Chechnya go, but it is determined to reinstate its oppressive imperial rule over the south Caucasus and Baltic republics.
However, the connection you seem to see is a mirage, the only reason for north Caucasian attacks on Russian targets is the brutal behavior of Russian Federal troops in the North Caucasus.
They just want you guys to eff off.
So, Andrew, the Russian occupation of Chechnya is wrong, but Georgian occupation of Abkhazia is good, eh?
Do you agree with the Georgian nationalists who say that it was a mistake for Georgia to sign the Georgievsk Treaty with Russia, because by doing so , Georgians could no longer enjoy massacres at the hands of Turks and Persians. These people point out that Georgians should have been under Turks, like Armenians did. These people say: “Sure Armenians died in the Holocaust in Turkey, and sure their lands are now in the hands of Turks, but at least their bodies are buried in a NATO country.”
Well, the Georgians made up the largest pre war population, and have lived in Abkhazia for all of recorded history.
See all the Churches, castles, and bridges built by Georgians dating back to the 4th century, and the fact that the Greeks and Romans referred to the inhabitants of Dioscuras/Sukhumi as Svans and Mingrels…..
How can a population that is native to the region, and has lived there for over 2000 years be “occupiers”?
Just remember that it was the Apsu who committed massive ethnic cleansing.
However, you have a habit of supporting such behavior when it is committed by pro Russian ethnic groups, such as the Serbs against everybody else in FY, the Ossetians against the Ingush and the Georgians, and the Apsu against the non Apsu/Armenian population of Abkhazia You do know that almost the entire ethnic Russian component was cleansed too don’t you? The Russians who live there now are the “Volunteers” and their families who assisted in these massive war crimes.
A very large number of ethnic Russian refugees from Abkhazia live in Zugdidi and Tbilisi, and I know many of them.
They are of quite a different stamp to you, as one said to me when I asked him if it was hard to fight against the Russian volunteers he said “My family has been in Sukhumi for nearly 200 years, that makes me a Georgian, all my family ever got from Russia was grief”
First of all, Abkhazians are the native people of Abkhazia, and I will try to find earlier discussions in this blog that prove it.
Second, Andrew wrote: “How can a population that is native to the region, and has lived there for over 2000 years be “occupiers”?
Well, Palestinians have lived in Palestine/Israel for more than 2000 years, and yet we Jews claimed Israel as our own country, independent from Arabs and from the Brits, back in 1947.
Here, I found one:
Michael Tal // October 24, 2009 at 2:52 am
Andrew wrote:
> 1886 census = Georgians 50.6% (34,806), Abkhaz 41.1% (28,320),… Total 68,773
That is total BS. Nothing more than Georgian propaganda. Here are the REAL official results of the 1886 census:
http://www.ethno-kavkaz.narod.ru/rnabkhazia.html
There were virtually no Georgians proper in Abkhazia. There were Mengrels: about 4 thousand. What your statistics call “Georgians” – the census calls Samurzaq’anons. But they were not Georgians. They were a mixture of Abkhazians and Mengrels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Abkhazia
The earliest reliable records for Abkhazia are the Family Lists compiled in 1886 (published 1893 in Tbilisi), according to which the Sukhumi District’s population was 68,773, of which 30,640 were Samurzaq’anoans, 28,323 Abkhaz, 3,558 Mingrelians, 2,149 Greeks, 1,090 Armenians, 1,090 Russians and 608 Georgians[1] (including Imeretians and Gurians). Samurzaq’ano is a present-day Gali district of Abkhazia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gali_district
The upper class of this new principality was composed chiefly of the Georgian-speaking Abkhaz nobility, whereas the peasants were of both Abkhaz and Georgian (Mingrelian) background.
You cannot count Samurzaq’anons as pure Georgians at all.
Therefore, if we split Samurzaq’anons as half Abkhazian and half Georgian, then the percentages will be roughly:
1886 census = Georgians 27%, Abkhaz 64%
Even if we split Samurzaq’anons as third Abkhazian and two thirds Georgian, then the percentages will be roughly:
1886 census = Georgians 35%, Abkhaz 56%
————————-
Michael Tal // October 24, 2009 at 7:23 am
In reality, Samurzaq’anons are all ethnic Abkhazians, who inhabited this region from ancient times but who were forcibly Mengrelized in the 19th century by Georgians and the Russian Empire that always took the Georgian side (partially because Georgians are fellow Orthodox Christians):
http://www.fuadiye.com/Bagapsh-3.html
Excuse me Voice of Retardation, you still have not shown anything to suggest that Georgians are not native to Abkhazia, they have been there for over 2000 years my retarded friend.
There is no evidence that Samurzaq’anons are all ethnic Abkhazians, who inhabited this region from ancient times but who were forcibly Mengrelized in the 19th century by Georgians and the Russian Empire that always took the Georgian side (partially because Georgians are fellow Orthodox Christians)
Interestingly, you are continuing to harp on about Mingrelians “not being real Georgians” when the Mingrelians consider themselves Georgians indeed, they are also very offended by attempts of vermin such as yourself to define them as “non-Georgian”.
Funny how you change your tune when it comes to Ukrainians, they are part of the “slavic Brotherhood” despite the fact that Ukrainians definitely do not see themselves as Russian.
More of your all too common hypocrisy.
Meanwhile:
Historically, the present-day Gali district constituted the borderland between the principalities of Abkhazia and Samegrelo, the two breakaway feudal domains of the Kingdom of Georgia, and frequently changed its masters as the borders of these princedoms fluctuated during the dynastic feuds between the Shervashidze and Dadiani clans. In the second half of the 17th century, the Shervashidze princes of Abkhazia succeeded in conquering the territories up the Inguri River including the Gali district. With the dissolution of the Principality of Abkhazia c. 1700, the district between the Galidzga to the Inguri came to be ruled by a branch of the Shervashidze family whose one member, Murzakan, gave to his new fiefdom the name “Samurzakano” (i.e, “land of Murzakan”). The upper class of this new principality was composed chiefly of the Georgian-speaking Abkhaz nobility, whereas the peasants were of both Abkhaz and Georgian (Mingrelian) background. In contrast to the rest of Abkhazia largely Islamized under the Ottoman Empire, Samurzakano remained adherent to the Georgian Orthodox Christianity.
…….
The rate of intermarriages between the Georgians and Abkhaz was high that resulted in the mixed heritage of the district’s population and the introduction of the special category “Samurzakanians” in the 1897 Imperial Russian census. This group was made up chiefly by the Mingrelians with a minority of Abkhaz. 38% and 35% of the district’s population identified themselves as Mingrelian and Georgian respectively during the first Soviet census of 1926, with another 26% identifying themselves as Abkhaz. The latter group in Gali district declined greatly so that they formed only a few percent of its population. As the Soviet censuses carried out after 1926 didn’t distinguish Georgians and Mingrelians as separate nationalities they together constituted the overwhelming majority in the district.
More or your retardation Mr Tal.
Note that your favourite source describes the Samurzakanians as chiefly Mingrelians with a minority of Abkhazians.
Then, if we look back even further:
Between 2100 and 750 B.C., the area survived the invasions by the Hittites, Celts, Medes, Proto-Persians and Cimmerians. At the same period, the ethnic unity of Proto-Kartvelians broke up into several branches, among them Svan, Zan and East-Kartvelian ones. that finally led to the formation of modern Kartvelian languages: Georgian (originating from East Kartvelian vernaculars), Svan, Megrelian and Laz (the latter two originating from Zan dialects).
By that time Svans were dominant in modern Svanetia and Abkhazia, Zans inhabited modern Georgian province of Samegrelo, north-eastern coast of Turkey between the rivers of Coruh and Kizil-Irmak, and partially Georgian provinces of Imereti and Guria, while East-Kartvelians formed the majority in modern eastern Georgia, partially northern Armenia and north-eastern Turkey between the rivers of Coruh and Arax.
As a result of cultural and geographic delimitation, two core areas of future Georgian culture and statehood formed in western and eastern Georgia by the end of the 8th century B.C. The first Georgian state was the Kingdom of Colchis that covered modern western Georgia (including Abkhazia) and modern Turkish provinces of Coruh & Rize. The Kingdom of Colchis has been mentioned in ancient chronicles at least since the middle of the 6th century B.C. Less than 300 years later, the Kingdom of Iberia (or Kartlia) emerged in modern eastern Georgia and south-eastern Turkey.
…….
There is little or no exact information about the ethnic composition of Colchis and Iberia. Since 2 000 B.C., north-western Colchis (modern Abkhazia and part of Krasnodar territory of Russia) was inhabited not only by the Svan and Zan but partially also by the Apsyl people whose origins are unclear. It is assumed but not proven that the Apsyls could be the ancestors of today’s Apsua (one of the ethnic groups of modern Abkhazia speaking distinct language belonging to Adygh group). Another important ethnic element of ancient Colchis were Greeks who between 1000 and 550 B.C., established quite a few trade colonies in the coastal area among them Naessus, Pitiys (modern resort town of Pitsunda), Dioscurias, Guenos, Phasis (modern Poti), Apsaros and Rhizos (modern Rize in Turkey).
http://www.conflicts.rem33.com/images/Georgia/geor_histr1.htm
Georgian ethnic groups (be they Svan, Zan, Mingrel, Kartvel) have lived in what we now term Abkhazia for all of recorded history, as have the Apsu.
As I have repeatedly stated, both ethnic groups are native to the region.
However, you are simply too poorly educated, or to stupid and racist to understand this simple historical fact.
And this from the ethnographist Svetlana Chervonnaya
The language and ethnocultural closeness with the Adyghe does not mean any isolation of the Abkhazians from other peoples of the Northern Caucasus and Transcaucasia. From ancient times particu larly close cultural and genetic ties linked the Abkhazians with Geor gian tribes, their immediate neighbours in the eastern Black Sea litto ral. This is confirmed by the archaeological remains of material cul ture (in particular, by the diffusion of the Colchian culture of the Bronze and Early Iron Ages throughout the territory of Western Geor gia, including a large part of the present-day Abkhazian Autonomy), Georgian-Abkhazian ethnographic parallels, mutual borrowing of lexical and morphological elements in the languages, numerous co incidences in place names, etc. Even the earliest mention of the an cestors of the Abkhazians in Assyrian Sources under the names of the tribe Abeshla (in the inscription of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser, 11th century B.C.) is found in immediate proximity with the listing of Georgian tribes Qulha (Colchians), Zevah (Jovah), Taochoi, etc. forming the mixed population of this region.
References to ancient Abkhazians (under the ethnonyms Abasgoi and Absili or Apsili) in classical authors, in particular Pliny the Younger, Arrian and other Roman sources of the first and second cen turies, are also in permanent correlation with the listing of various tribes of Kartvelian origin (Mingrel-Chan and Svan). So, ancient Geor gians lived with ancient Abkhazians on common land, engaging in complex ethnocultural interaction. The antiquity of origin and length of residence of the Abkhazians in this land is acknowledged by his torical science: the idea that they are newcomers is out of the ques tion. In the Abkhazian national mentality home is rightly felt to be this strip of rich land (8,600 square kilometers) between the Greater Caucasus Range and the Black Sea shore. It is bounded by the river Psou in the north-west and by the Inguri in the south-east, covering the woody slopes of the Caucasus mountains and the sub-tropical zone of the Kolkheti lowland, which, according to the administrative division of the USSR, was over the decades officially designated the Abkhazian ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) within the Georgian SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic).
The right of the Abkhazians to consider this land to be their historical homeland – the ancient arena of their ethnogenesis – is beyond all question. However, any ideas that their ancestors were the only inhabitants of this land, and that there are no ancient roots of Georgian culture here, are absolutely erroneous and illusory.
The point is not only that the boundaries of the settlement of the Abkhazians in ancient times and throughout the Middle Ages were vague and transparent, but that they suffered considerable change and were eventually defined quite arbitrarily as the borders of the Abkhazian Soviet Socialist Republic. This claimed to be a state created on the basis of the right to national self-determination of the Abkhazian ethnos, though the Abkhazians constitute an ethnic minority on this territory.
In the Georgian national mentality this land is also rightly considered as their own territory, an organic part of the Georgian people who have lived here from time immemorial, formed their culture, gave their names to the mountains and rivers, towns and villages, fought side by side with the Abkhazian people against common enemies and were subject to common kings and princes. In the dramatic peripeteia of ancient and mediaeval history this, of course, did not rule out a shifting alignment of forces when related tribes and close neighbours fought against each other and argued over land, faith, crown and booty. Be that as it may, in 1917 on the territory of the future Abkhazian ASSR the Georgians totalled 42.1 % of the local population, and the Abkhazians 21.4%. So, not only by virtue of historico-cultural association, but also ethnodemographically this land should be considered part of Georgia.
http://www.conflicts.rem33.com/images/abkhazia/Czerwon_E.htm
http://www.fuadiye.com/Bagapsh-3.html
Google translate:
Ethnic Processes in Samurzakane (Gali).
One of the historical land of Abkhazia – Samurzakan – is at the extreme east of the country’s border with Georgia. Abkhazia’s the name of this territory “Samyrzayan” comes from the ruler Murzakana (abh. Myrzayan) Chachba who received this extreme eastern part of the Abkhazian principality inherited from his father Kuapa. In honor of the ruler Murzakana and was named this border with Samegrelo region. The prefix “self-” in the Abkhaz language indicates it belongs to the first-person pronoun singular (from “Sarah” – “I”).
Currently, the Territory Samurzakana administratively represents the Gali district. Most of its territory is located in the Colchis lowland. In this regard, is the most Samurzakan disbursed to the agricultural terms of regions of Abkhazia and also the most densely populated.
Samurzakan ancient times was populated by Abkhazians, who, like the rest of the Abkhazians, spoke in the Abkhazian language and wore Abkhazian surnames.
In the middle of the XIX century Samurzakan was added to the “Russian” Samegrelo and there began the mass megrelizatsiya population. Unknown author of the book “Guide to the knowledge of the Caucasus” notes in this connection: “Samurzakantsy not obeyed, hating the newly set by the authorities, beaten and chased away officials Dadiani. “We have Abkhazia and not Mingrelians, why put over us a power which neither knew nor wanted to know, and let the laws Dadiana make miserable his subjects, rather he and those, Russian will not come true in our mountains,” – assuring each other so They hurried through Ingur to-ugdidy, drove herds Dadiana and captured men in bondage. In short, they arbitrarily declared war Dadiani. This mischief was not the end. Dadian only threatened, but to punish samurzakantsev was not able to, and they also laughed at his weakness, and said: “let him come try our swords and bullets, the first sharp, the latter is correct”.
Pantyukhov in the newspaper “World” in 1865, wrote the following: “Samurzakan time immemorial is an inseparable part of Abkhazia. This, incidentally, is confirmed by the fact that neighboring Abzhivsky (NB – Abzhua, Ochamchire district) district of Abkhazia in the Russian translation means the average … “.
What Samurzakantsy XIX-th century were very different from Megrelians and is a typical Abkhazians, confirms the Italian traveler Carla Serena
With the same proof of Abkhazian origin Samurzakantsev appears in his work “Essays on the ethnography of the Caucasus” in 1867 EK Kovalevsky. In particular he said that samurzakantsy and the rest of the Abkhazians “quite similar to each other on a typical outdoor signs, in manners, customs and language,” that the princes and nobles Samurzakana trace their family right out of Abkhazia, with the exception of very few moved from Megrelia.
Since the second half of the XIX century, the territory Samurzakana moved more and more Megrelians from neighboring-county ugdidskogo Kutaisi province. By the beginning of XX century, according to the documentary data, there were already 5300 Samurzakane Megrelians (about 13% of the population), but the major share (80%) in the local population samurzakantsy (ethnic Abkhazians). Strengthening the processes of ethnic assimilation samurzakanskih Abkhazians contributed significantly increasing frequency of interethnic marriages, mostly between the Abkhaz and megrelkami, rarely between Samegrelo and abhazkami. As a child first learns the language that speaks to him mother, and due to some other objective reasons Megrelian language from the end of XIX century is beginning to occupy an increasingly prominent position in Samurzakane, gradually displacing the more complex the Abkhaz.
In support of this outstanding Georgian historian, social activist, educator and teacher Konstantin Machavariani said: “In manners and customs, language and religion, samurzakantsy constitute one inseparable tribe with the Abkhazians. If the Abkhaz language was degenerate into Samurzakani, thanks megreltsam, which gradually began to withdraw into their own hands not only samurzakantsev, but the whole of Abkhazia “.
S. D. Inal-Ipa, in his article “On the change in the ethnic situation in Abkhazia in the XX century”, noted that “if a Samurzakane most noble families spoke in the Abkhazian language, and if that language in their everyday lives are still preserved in various villages of this country, such as in the villages Eshket, Bedia, Gal, Aukum, etc., if the names of many families, as Shervashidze, Margani, Marchand, Svanbay, Lakerbay, Emukhvari and others are the same as in the present Abkhazians, if marriage was considered a megreltsev valid only after the blessing of the priest, the samurzakantsev does not require a church blessing, provided that there remained many purely Abkhazian customs, the “old samurzakanets” Still, in the end, may consider their fellow countrymen to the Abkhazians.
In his article “Who populate Abkhazia? Jakob Gogebashvili particularly stressed that” samurzakantsy – a branch of the Abkhaz tribe.
In one of the works of Konstantin Machavariani some interesting facts assimilation policies Samurzakane pursued by violent megrelizatsii. In particular, the local Abkhaz names redesigns priests in Megrelian way. Thus, the genus Achba began wearing megrelizirovannuyu name Anchbaya (in Georgian transcription Anchabadze) Chachba – Sharashiya (Shervashidze) Amarschan – Marshania, etc
After the February Revolution of Abkhaz People’s Council began to negotiate with the population Samurzakana on the inclusion of Abkhazia within the Joint Union Caucasian highlanders. However, the local Georgian priests sent a complaint to the administration in the Caucasus. Satisfying this complaint, the Russian administration to submit the application on the allocation of Samurzakana from the Abkhazia and joining it to Kutaisi province with the subordination of the provincial commissioner Chkhikvishvili. However samurzakanskoe population rebelled against this administrative reform and refused to obey the Governor Kutaisi, resulting in two months Samurzakan again returned to the composition of Abkhazia. However, at this point samurzakanskoe (ethnically Georgian) separated the clergy from the Diocese and to recognize Abkhaz Catholicos of Georgia.
During the occupation forces of Abkhazia the Georgian Democratic Republic in all the villages Samurzakana Georgian schools were opened, all paperwork in the county was transferred exclusively on the Georgian language. However, the Abkhaz People’s Council, so popular among the people reacted to these actions, the invaders on the territory of the Gali district are loyal, giving people Samurzakana right to choose.
Most samurzakantsev reacted to these actions by the Georgian authorities with indignation. Representatives of the population Samurzakana said that they are the Abkhazians, and those actions that are carried out by the occupation authorities in the county, contrary to the basic rights of the Abkhaz nation.
By the time the proclamation of Soviet power in Abkhazia assimilation of the Abkhaz in Gali district not only not ceased, but even more intensified. More and more landless peasants move into Megrelian Samurzakan. Megrelian language in Samurzakane by this time had almost completely replaced the Abkhaz, but samurzakantsy, for the most part lost their native language, do not stop to consider themselves the Abkhazians.
Thus, the first All-Union census of 1926 in the Gali district population is only 13 thousand people who called themselves the Abkhazians. In the future, all residents ordered recorded Georgians, and indigenous samurzakantsy, experiencing a relentless assimilation of the eastern neighbors, have changed their ethnic identity and began to consider themselves Megrelians, and then, like most Megrelians, Georgians.
In 1920-1930-ies the Abkhaz language in Samurzakane was finally ousted Georgian and Megrelian. That’s what I wrote one of the Moscow journalists, who visited in the summer of 1925 in Abkhazia and in particular in the Gali district: “At present, this relationship (NB – between Abkhaz and Megrelians) health recreation, but of course, traces of the past give feel at every step, besides the best policy can not stop the unconditional process of slow disappearance of Abkhazians and their dissolution in a medium powerful neighbors, as evidenced by the situation in some villages (NB – obviously, in the Gali district), where local people find it difficult to speak, live there a “natural” or enacted Mingrelians Mingrelian look Abkhazians. ”
Thus, because of the assimilation of ethnic processes in the Gali district of Abkhazia, the total number of the Abkhazian population, since the middle of the XIX century, steadily declined until 1930, when megrelizatsiya samurzakantsev ceased completely. If in 1886 the Abkhaz in Abkhazia, there were 58,963 people in 1897 – 58,697 people, in 1926 – already 55 918 people.
Today samurzakanskoe adverb Zugdidi-samurzakanskogo Megrelian dialect of the language included in its membership the highest compared with other adverbs Megrelian layer Abkhaz language. Modern Megrels Gali district for the most part are modified by the Abkhaz names, retain some Abkhaz customs and recognize their mixed Abkhaz-Megrelian origin.
Perhaps it is because of all this population in the Gali district had refused to take part in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992-1993, and after the war, unlike most Georgians living in Abkhazia, is almost completely returned to their villages and the city gal.
§ 4. The resettlement of Georgians in Abkhazia in the Stalin-Beria period.
The most powerful wave Georgianisation Abkhazia began in the late 1930’s, when the power in the Soviet Union began to concentrate in the hands of Joseph Stalin, and in-akavkaze actual master was Laurentius Beria.
The impetus for beginning the systematic Georgianisation Abkhazia was renamed in 1936, the Abkhazian capital of Sukhumi in the ACC “Sukhumi” and the mysterious death of a loved by the people of Abkhazia leader Nestor Lakoba at the end of that year.
I must say that the period in question was complicated not only for the Abkhaz people, but for the rest of the population of the huge state.
Mass repression was not spared and the Georgian people, who lost in the years of repression thousands of lives. In Georgia, were destroyed by prominent statesmen and political leaders, prominent representatives of science and culture, outstanding poets and writers – Tabidze Titian, Paolo Iashvili, Mikhail Javakhishvili State … azgromu been the best part of the Georgian intelligentsia, which expressed disagreement with the policies of Stalin and Beria.
After the mass cleansing in 1937, Stalin began to implement the long-held dream to create a cozy Georgian empire in the Caucasus. To this end, the Georgian SS and adjacent regions of deportation were separate nations and ethnic groups. Is expanding political and ethnic boundaries, and then Georgia. Because of the republic have been evicted Meskhetian Turks, Greeks, Kurds, Khemshins, and even Laz – Kartvelian ethnic group, speaking a language close to Megrelian.
In the 30 years in Georgia with the personal approval of Stalin in the Georgian nation is officially incorporated Megrels, Svans and Lazes, which were previously regarded as separate nations. Since that time no longer a small layer, but almost all Megrels and Svans learn the Georgian language, as the sole language of instruction in national schools, the language of office and printing. But now among these ethnic groups are still many elements of the endemic regional culture, not typical for other parts of Georgia. Lazy, most of whom live outside of Georgia to the neighboring governorates Ajaria Turkey still does not speak the Georgian language and do not identify themselves as Georgians.
In 1943 – 1944 years of genocide of the indigenous population was subjected to the Northern Caucasus. With the help of the NKVD of the Karachay Autonomous Oblast had been deported to 70,000 Karachais. Center field was renamed in Kluhori, and most of the area under the name Kluhorsky district included in the Georgian SS. All settlements in the region to have Georgian names. In a similar scenario from Kabardino-Balkaria ACC were forcibly deported to Kazakhstan more than 40 thousand Balkars. Tragedy struck the Chechen and Ingush peoples. More than 600,000 Chechens and Ingush were deported to Kazakhstan and Central Asian republics. Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the SSA from 22 March 1944 the Chechen-Ingush ACC was dissolved and reorganized into the Grozny Region … highlands of south-west of the former Republic was composed of Dusheti and Kazbegi regions of Georgia SS, other areas – in the North Ossetian ACC. Seven major areas of the Chechen-Ingushetia regional center have been renamed. In the deserted villages and mountain villages repressed North Caucasus migrated from various nations, including the Georgians from the neighboring areas of Georgia.
Why Voice Of Retardation, all you are using is Apsu propaganda. Propaganda that is the result of racist policies, though this is not surprising considering you are a Russian, and an apologist for genocide and ethnic cleansing.
I prefer to use the writings of historical experts, be they eye witnesses (Strabo etc) or actual historians and archaeologists, rather than the ravings of a bunch of genocidal maniacs who committed a massive ethnic cleansing of the non Apsu population.
You really would make an excellent capo.
Andrew,
Everything you post is pure unadulterated propaganda.
Really?
Not at all Voice of Retardation.
I posted articles from respected historians, and you posted a racist rant from a separatist website, that is directly contradicted by all historical research.
You are pathetic.
Not to mention a supporter of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
A real Capo, Hitler would be so proud….
Andrew,
Stop demagoguery. You constantly quote the most despicable sources. For example, you constantly throw at us R.J. Rummel’s obscene figures for the number of victims of Soviet domicide. And then the little internet vote for the “most famous Russian” in which anybody from anywhere in the world could vote as many times as he pleases – you use it as “proof” that “Russians love Stalin”. And then you tell us that because Stalin received few votes on some TV game show in Georgia, this is “proof” that “Georgians hate Stalin”. And then you used Saakashvili’s lie that he was going to tear Stalin’s monument down, as “proof” that Saakashvili hates Stalin. Well, since the Stalin monument is still there, we have proof that Saakaskvili and Georgians LOVE Stalin and Nazis, because they keep Stalin’s monuments standing but destroy monuments to anti-Nazi heroes.
Yes, I remember you calling Rummel a “lying snake” and stating that he was hated by R.Conquest.
However I pointed out that Rummel is supported in his numbers by people like A.solzhenitsyn. who claimed 60 million dead in the period.
Adler, N., Victims of Soviet Terror, 1993 cites these:
Chistyakovoy, V. (Neva, no.10): 20 million killed during the 1930s.
Dyadkin, I.G. (Demograficheskaya statistika neyestestvennoy smertnosti v SSSR 1918-1956 ): 56 to 62 million “unnatural deaths” for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49 million under Stalin.
Gold, John.: 50-60 million.
Davies, Norman (Europe A History, 1998): c. 50 million killed 1924-53, excluding WW2 war losses. This would divide (more or less) into 33M pre-war and 17M after 1939.
William Cockerham, Health and Social Change in Russia and Eastern Europe: 50M+
Wallechinsky: 13M (1930-32) + 7M (1934-38)
Cited by Wallechinsky:
Medvedev, Roy (Let History Judge): 40 million.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: 60 million.
MEDIAN: 51 million for the entire Stalin Era; 20M during the 1930s.
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm
You also forget that Robert Conquest omitted from his totals the following:
Considering that Stalin died in 1953, note what Conquest did not include — camp deaths after 1950, and before 1936; executions 1939-53; the vast deportation of the people of captive nations into the camps, and their deaths 1939-1953; the massive deportation within the Soviet Union of minorities 1941-1944; and their deaths; and those the Soviet Red Army and secret police executed throughout Eastern Europe after their conquest during 1944-1945 is omitted. Moreover, omitted is the deadly Ukrainian famine Stalin purposely imposed on the region and that killed 5 million in 1932-1934. So, Conquest’s estimates are spotty and incomplete.
Now ReTaRd, where is your evidence that Conquest hates Rummel?
BTW, how do you explain over 200 monuments to Stalin in Russia, and all the new additions of the last few years?
No new monuments to Stalin in Georgia for 60 years.
Now, how do you explain that you describe evidence of Georgian presence in Abkhazia for over 2000 years written by internationally recognised archaeologists and historians as “propaganda”, while quoting from a website unsubstantiated claims by ethnic cleansing separatists as gospel truth?
You really are a joke.
Andrew wrote: “However I pointed out that Rummel is supported in his numbers by people like ”
“A.solzhenitsyn. claimed 60 million dead in the period”? Really? If so – why did you forget to give the quote from “A.solzhenitsyn”?
Please do so.
Well, look in the list above.
Oh, thats right, you are too stupid to read.
Have you ever actually read “The Gulag Archipelago”?
Solzhenitsyn on the failing of atheism:
Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
Edward E. Ericson, Jr., “Solzhenitsyn – Voice from the Gulag,” Eternity, October 1985, pp. 23, 24.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn#Communism.2C_Russia_and_nationalism
Another more troubling possibility is that the Gulag, into which Solzhenitsyn estimated 60 million people vanished, is by some odd accord fading from the memory
Read his books ReTaRd.
Then there is:
Dyadkin, I.G. (Demograficheskaya statistika neyestestvennoy smertnosti v SSSR 1918-1956 ): 56 to 62 million “unnatural deaths” for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49 million under Stalin.
Which tallies pretty well with Rummel.
By the way, here is what Solzhenitsyn had to say about the Vietnam war:
Once in America, Solzhenitsyn urged the United States to continue its involvement in the Vietnam War.[70]
In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978 (A World Split Apart), Solzhenitsyn alleged that many in the U.S. did not understand the Vietnam War. He rhetorically asks if the American Anti-War Movement ever realized the effects their actions had on Vietnam: “But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?”[58]
During his time in the United States, Solzhenitsyn made several controversial public statements: notably, he accused Pentagon Papers leak Daniel Ellsberg of treason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn#Vietnam_war
Seems he would not have much time for you ReTaRd
Andrew, when Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Prize winning fiction writer, allegedly exclaimed to Edward E. Ericson, Jr. that “swallowed up some 60 million of our people”, it doesn’t in any means prove that Solzhenitsyn had conclusive research results that 60 million died at the hands of Stalin and his henchmen. First of all, the word “swallowed” is not a synonym to “killed”. For example, Solzhenitsyn himself was swallowed by GULAGs where he spent many years. Yet, he wasn’t killed, was he? I hear that Solzhenitsyn estimates the number of people who survived GULAG to be more than 15 million. Solzhenitsyn also included millions and millions who fought and/or died and/or were wounded in the Civil War of 1918-1920. And so on.
So, if you can give me a direct quote (with full context) from Solzhenitsyn himself, not hearsay, where he gives the figure of 60 million killed with an explanation as to how he derived this figure – great. If not – stop quoting irrelevant hearsay.
And thanks for quoting Dyadkin, I.G. (Demograficheskaya statistika neyestestvennoy smertnosti v SSSR 1918-1956 ): 56 to 62 million “unnatural deaths” for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49 million under Stalin.
For example, recall that USSR suffered 27 million “unnatural deaths” from World War Two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union
Thus, of these “34 to 49 million unnatural deaths under Stalin”, only 7 to 22 million were not due to the War. And these figures – 7 to 22 million – are fully in line with what legitimate scientists like Conquest say.
Thanks for proving that R.J. Rummel is a liar, Andrew. So, why do you insist on quoting him?
Actually moron, Rummel includes those who died in the Russian civil war, the mass famines, the deportations etc in his total of 61,911,000.
Chapter 1. 61,911,000 Victims: Utopianism Empowered 1917 to 1987
Consisting of
Chapter 2. 3,284,000 Victims: The Civil War Period 1917 to 1922
Chapter 3. 2,200,000 Victims: The NEP Period 1923-1928
Chapter 4. 11,440,000 Victims: The Collectivization Period 1928-1935
Chapter 5. 4,345,000 Victims: The Great Terror Period 1935-1938
Chapter 6. 5,104,000 Victims: Pre-World War II Period 1939 to June, 1941
Chapter 7. 13,053,000 Victims: World War II Period June, 1941 to 1945
Chapter 8. 15,613,000 Victims: Post-War and Stalin’s Twilight Period 1945-1953
Chapter 9. 6,872,000 Victims: Post-Stalin Period 1954-1987
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM
What you keep forgetting, oh brainless wonder, is that Rummel is looking at the overall effect of Russian communist tyrrany, not just at the Stalin years.
In addition, he is also counting those civilians from non USSR nations that the Russian government murdered, people like Poles, Fins, Mongolians, Perisans, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Czechs & Slovaks, Romanians, etc, etc, etc.
No wonder you are such an idiot.
In addition, the USSR was still happily killing its own people during the war, I guess you think we should not count all those deportees who died against the Russian total of mass murder?
Really ReTaRd, you are pathetic.
He ascribes a probable estimate of deaths in or on the way to the gulag of 40 million. 40 million…
The Real Gulag
The history of this sewage system [labor camps] is the history of an endless swallow and flow; flood alternating with ebb and ebb again with flood; waves pouring in, some big, some small; brooks and rivulets flowing in from all sides; trickles oozing in through gutters; and then just plain individually scooped-up droplets.
—- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The forced labor camp system that ultimately became known as Gulag (from the Russian acronym Gulag for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, a department of the Soviet secret police, originally the Cheka; subsequently the GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, and finally the KGB) were legally sanctioned in July, 1918, with the decree that inmates capable of labor must be compelled to do physical work. This was the beginning of the deadly, Soviet forced labor, what could as well be called, slave labor, system. In the next year decrees established forced labor camps in each provincial capitol and a lower limit of 300 prisoners in each camp. The first large camps were established on the far north Solovetsky Islands. In August, 1919, Lenin made the Party view clear in a telegram: “Lock up all the doubtful ones in a concentration camp outside the city.” As Solzhenitsyn notes, these people are not even “guilty” ones, but only “doubtful”.
From the beginning, the conditions in some of these camps were so atrocious, often calculatingly so, that prisoners could not expect to survive for more than several years. One at Kholmogori near Archangel became known as a death camp, it was so perilous to prisoners that were often sent to these camps to die, not after a court trial, but by a simple administrative decision.
By the end of 1920, official figures admitted to 84 camps in 43 provinces of the Russian Republic alone, with almost 50,000 inmates (including Civil War POWs). By October, 1922, there were 132 camps with about 60,000 inmates. I prudently estimate that among all these prisoners during this whole period, 34,000 died. That this may be an underestimate and the toll may be as high as 72,000 can be seen in the light of the frequent camp executions; the not uncommon deaths or prisoners from beatings, disease, exposure, and fatigue; the occasional emptying of camps by loading inmates on barges and then sinking them (such as on the River Dvina, near the two camps Kholmogory and Pertominsk in Archangel Province)
The camps had not yet morphed into the killing system every Soviet citizen and official feared. This occurred during the collectivization period in the early 1930s. But, during the NEP (Lenin’s New Economic Policy) period from 1923 to 1928, the Party laid the legal framework for expanding the camps beyond imagination. Among other decrees, a new criminal code provided for forced labor for political crimes and for political opponents. The camps system then multiplied rapidly and by the end of 1928, prisoner totals reached 240,000, of which at least 140,000 may have been in camps. However, there is one difficulty in comprehending such numbers, even during this immature stage in this “sewage disposal system” that in a decade would be a multi-million prisoner, slave-empire. The number of prisoners at any one time was a dynamic, a snapshot of this swirling “sewage” as new “refuse” poured in from various pipes and old “waste” was flushed out the bottom.
In his three-volume, The Gulag Archipelago , Solzhenitsyn has made vivid, stark, the life among these prisoners of Gulag, as the labor camp system now became known. As dictated by Lenin, the Party had made clear that these camps were not simply to isolate enemies of the people and criminals, but to work them for the Revolution. As the Communisit Party developed this imperative, it was work at least cost. The prisoners were expendable; other state resources were not. They were forced to labor usually 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, in excavating mines, felling timber, digging canals. They were worked in snow and ice, at temperatures sometimes at -30 or -40 degrees Fahrenheit, often without adequate clothing and sometimes in the clothes they wore when arrested. They were fed a diet hardly adequate in calories to maintain the life of an inactive person, and surely deficient in those nutrients required to avoid scurvy and other such diseases.
For example, in the 1937 regulations of the Ukhta-Pechora Labor Camp located above the Arctic Circle (the only such regulations known outside the USSR), the daily allotment of calories for hard labor was 1,292 (American standards call for 3,000 for similar work). By the time the rations reached the prisoner, however, much of his allotment had been taken (by cooks, porters, guards, etc.). Moreover, including an allotted 400 grams of meat (that seldom reached the prisoner), the guard dogs were fed better. But the resulting hunger was not sheer brutality or bureaucratic malfeasance. Hunger became planned, and for the prisoners, the master of their thoughts, their desires, and their work. The would do anything for a rotten morsel of food
This, not to mention the beatings, arbitrary shootings, disciplinary starvation and exposure in solitary cells, and permitted violence and atrocities of the true criminals against the far more numerous political prisoners.
In Gulag’s maturity, over 30 percent of new inmates might die in a year from exposure, disease, malnutrition, and overwork, especially in the 1930s. Among miners in the infamous death camps of Kolyma, 30 to 35 percent died per year. Prisoners calculated that in the mines generally there were “two dead men for every yard dug underground.” Among Poles sent to these camps in 1940 and 1941, the toll was 75 to 80 percent in less than two years. But over the whole camp system and up to the death of Stalin, the death rate was most likely between 10 and 28 percent a year, most probably 20 percent. This means that even those sentenced to a lucky five years would probably not survive; those sentenced to the numerous tenners or, in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, commonplace 25 years, in effect received a sentence of death by hard labor. Survivors were usually those who were transferred to less deadly work, especially an administrative job in a camp, and in a position to make “deals” for life preserving food and clothing.
But survival was even more an individual odyssey, a bet of one’s life on a long series of sevens on the dice, than so far appears. Camp was only the final stage of a three-stage, deadly obstacle course life had to run.
First, a person was arrested, secretly or otherwise. And for those common folk who lived during the first 42 years of Soviet history, the chances were very high of undergoing at least one arrest. In fact, just during the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, 5 to 10 percent of the population probably was arrested. Some lucky ones were released after an initial interrogation, perhaps after promising to spy on their associates or neighbors. But tens of millions were subjected to a savage interrogation, and often torture, of which the invariable aim was a written confession of guilt and the naming of accomplices. Since arrest was prima facie evidence of guilt, screaming claims of innocence only provoked the interrogator. One fingered others, signed the confession, or died.
Most prisoners probably signed almost immediately. Yes, they were plotting to kill Lenin or Stalin or to provide maps for German paratroopers to drop on the Kremlin. Better to die quickly with a bullet in the back of the head, than slowly under the interrogator’s twisting knife. The problem was that they also had to incriminate others. It was no good just to contrive some plot involving, say, top communists, for there had to be plausible evidence (meetings, letters, etc.) of a relationship. Often, the interrogator suggested the names of associates or friends that they were after and one only needed to fill in some details (“Yes, we did meet and we talked about…”).
How many died in interrogation, and how many were subsequently executed overall, can only be a wild guess; I can find no overall estimates. Surely, over the thirty years during which this system was developed and functioned to chew up tens of millions of people, several million must have died in interrogation or by execution. While no general figures are available, we can estimate for one period, that of the Great Terror (1936-1938), that from 500,000 to 2,000,000 were executed, most likely 1,000,000. A report that the Politburo requested of its Organs in 1956 claimed that 7,000,000 were shot in prison from 1935 to 1940. Some credibility is given this figure in considering that of those who escaped execution at this stage, the pipeline would carry at least 32,600,000 to their death in the camps. Some experts say 60,000,000. A Soviet scientist gives a research estimate of 52,000,000 to 54,000,000 for just the 1930s to 1950s. Solzhenitsyn claims 70,000,000. I calculate a most probable estimate of 39,464,000 killed in the camps and in transit to or between them.
If one managed to survive interrogation, then came the dangerous second stage: transportation to one’s final camp. Although there was some variation in means, transport, and mortality between the transportation of prisoners and that of deportees, which highlighted subsequent periods, there were important similarities.
Prisoners (or deportees) were crowded, even sometimes stacked without room to all lie down or sit, in cattle cars or cars converted and partitioned for the purpose, and possibly for some of their transport, in the holds of ships and barges (or even on rafts, as when conveyed by river to some desolate spot where prisoners were told to build their new camp). Generally, the cars were unheated and often unventilated; toilet facilities were hardly adequate and sometimes were simply holes in the floorboards. Some food and water might have been given; sometimes just water; sometimes nothing at all; but never enough. For political prisoners being transported to camps, there was an added danger from the criminals being transported with them. In gangs, these criminals robbed the politicals, beat and even killed them on a bet or for the joy of it, if not for the best places in the cars, or for the political’s food and water.
These transports may have lasted many weeks as cars were pulled from one siding to another, in fits and lurches to finally reach some dispersal camp (with its own dangers and mortality). And then again another transport, this time to some remote camp in, say, Siberia.
How many died on these trips? The only hard estimates we have are from deportations. In some cases the death rate reached 50 percent, especially for those crowded in cattle cars for several weeks during winter. In the February, 1940, deportations of Poles, the number who died reached 10 percent. In many other deportations, it may have been between 15 and 30 percent. Those in the camps calculated one death per railway sleeper. A prudent overall estimate is probably 17 percent for deportees, and 5 percent for prisoners transported to camp (who were generally males in the early or middle years). Working backwards from the most likely maximum camp population of the NEP Period, which was 200,000, the number that died in transit was likely around 9,000. For the 42 years to Stalin’s death in 1953, the transit toll among those being sent to camp alone was likely about 1,798,000; possibly as high as 5,895,000.
If these figures seem irresponsibly exaggerated, then also consider some of the historic death tolls en route or otherwise in transit between camps. In 1933, the transit ship Dzhurma sailed too late in the season and was caught in the ice near Wrangle Island—all prisoners died, perhaps as many as 12,000. In 1949, a transit ship carrying prisoners northward to the Kolyma camps from Vladivostok in 1949 was wrecked, killing 5,000 prisoners. Compare these virtually unknown fatalities (not even Ripley had recorded them) to the immortalized sinking of the Titanic, which cost 1,503 lives.
During the collectivization period 1928-1935 the camps were flooded with “evil” landowners and ordinary and well-off peasants. Hundreds of new camps were built, usually by prisoners in some grim, undeveloped area. By 1935, the Communisst Party possibly ensalved as many as 6,700,000 people in the camps; probably no fewer than 5,000,000. Most of these people were chained to some form of life endangering hard labor. For example, they were forced to build the Belomor Canal under such life-consuming conditions that at least 100,000 prisoners died. (Praised as a monument to the achievements of socialist labor, the canal was little used afterwards.)
This forced labor, camp system — Gulag — was fully developed during this period. It became, in effect, a slave-labor system, with prisoners bought and sold, and contracted for, as though commodities. They were treated with the same consideration: they had absolutely no rights, no individuality, and could be and were killed at the whim of the owner (especially, nonessential intelligentsia—scientists, engineers, doctors, teachers—who were weeded out for killing physical labor). Ponder the impressions of the manager of a Trust who was sent to Kem, the administration center for the Solovetzki camp, to purchase a squad of forced laborers.
Can you imagine that there . . . .the following expressions are freely used: “We sell!” — “We discount for quantity!” — “First class merchandise!” — “The city of Archangel offers 800 roubles [sic] a month for X. and you offer only 600! . . . .What merchandise! He gave a course in a university, is the author of a number of scientific works, was director of a large factory, in pre-war time was considered an outstanding engineer; now he’s serving a ten-year sentence at hard labor for ‘wrecking’; that means that he’ll do any kind of work required of him, and yet you quibble over 200 roubles!” Nevertheless, I bargained and they finally agreed to reduce the price, because we purchased at wholesale fifteen engineers.
A contract was signed, a lawyer checked and approved it, and the chief of the camp signed it.
As the collectivization and dekulakization campaigns concluded, the rivers of prisoners emptying into Gulag began to dry up. In 1934 a shortage of slave-labor developed, affecting NKVD production. Obviously, something had to be done and in a year plans for a new intake of prisoners were worked out. The NKVD subsequently assigned local agencies a fixed quota of arrests. Perhaps this partially explains why NKVD agents were then going out of their way to entrap citizens into showing dissatisfaction or making negative comments on the USSR or Party. The camps had to be filled.
The camps continued to eat up people by the millions in the following years to become even more deadly during World War II. For example, out of 50,000 prisoners at the railroad camp of Pechorlag in the Fall of 1941, there were 10,000 left alive the following Spring; out of 50 people in the central sector barracks of Burepolom Camp in February, 1943, at least four died a night, and one night 12 died (in the morning the dead would be replaced). Moreover, special categories of enemies were massacred periodically throughout the camps, such as the shooting in every camp of all former and actual Trotskyites in 1942. Moreover, camp administrators and guards were constantly on watch for ways to justify their exemption from duty at the front—“plots” and “conspiracies” among prisoners were regularly “discovered,” usually resulting in batches of prisoners being shot.
And in the 1941-1942 period the usual sources of death just intensified. Inmates fought for their lives against a starvation diet, and with food rations cut even below prewar levels, numerous camp complexes suffered from famine. Even then, already starvation level rations were cut when wholly unrealistic production quotas were not achieved. Add that in most camps there was no issue of cold weather clothing—wear what you came in—; that in the northern camps there was often a twice a day trek of three to over six miles between the work area and barracks for these hungry, ill-clothed prisoners, often in deep snow. And in 1941 to 1942, there was a dreadful winter, when in many camps the temperature was never above -31° Fahrenheit, but men worked anyway. Moreover, there was no day of rest; there were hordes of bedbugs and lice; and the barracks were unheated and freezing.
As if this were not enough, beginning in April, 1943, prisoners could be sentenced to Katorga (hard labor). This meant surviving under especially severe conditions, often working on 12 hour shifts with no days off and even less gruel and rotten potatoes than before. And the 12 work hours did not include the slow trek to and from the work site, nor the time spent being counted before and after the trek. Moreover, the prisoners may have been packed into nothing more than tents. The Vorkuta mines, one camp system to which Katorgans were sent, “were, undisguisedly, murder camps: but in the Gulag tradition murder was protracted, so that the doomed would suffer longer and put a little work in before they died.” Not one of the first group of 28,000 prisoners sent to this camp survived for a year.
In thinking about these abhorrent camp conditions during the war, whether Katorga or otherwise, also note that as the war progressed, fewer and fewer prisoners were released, even after miraculously surviving their sentence. They were just automatically resentenced. For the greater majority of prisoners this meant a sentence to camp was a sentence to death by hunger, malnutrition, hard labor, cold, disease, or at the hand of the criminals or camp guards, or by the teeth of guard dogs.
How many died under these wartime conditions in the camps? Some prisoners estimate that seven million were slaughtered in the first year of the war.” My more prudent estimate is that the total murdered in transit to or in the camps during the whole war period is 8,518,000 prisoners.
What irony, indeed. The democracies fought along side the Soviet Union to eradicate the horror of fascism from the world. And afterwards, the democracies shook their collective head over the documented mass, inhuman murder of Jews; and heaved a sigh of relief and thankfulness that this abominable Nazi system was utterly defeated. Yet, the democracies’ major ally and a victor sitting in judgment with them at the Nuremberg trials was, during that very war, murdering more innocent people just in their labor camps than the Nazis were machine gunning in the gullies and gassing in their concentration camps.
The camps continued their deadly purpose after the War, now bursting with German POWs, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, and émigrés, refugees, and escapees forced to return to the Soviet Union to face Stalin’s justice. With Stalin’s death in 1953, his successors slowly reformed the camps, emptied them of many of their prisoners, shut down the worst of them, and gradually improved their conditions. By the mid-1980s the camp population may have been reduced to about 4,000,000
Overall, from 1917 to 1987, Gulag, including transit deaths, probably killed about 39,464,000 Soviet citizens and foreigners. Compare this 6,228.5 mile stack of corpses (assuming each corpse has a width of 10 inches), each a loving, self-conscious human being like you and I, to these totals:
Gulag = 39,464,000 murdered (democide/genocide);
All American executions 1864-1982 = 5,753 killed;
All the Americans killed in all its wars up to the Gulf War = 1,177,936 killed;
The killed in battle in World War I = 9,000,000;
Of World War II = 15,000,000;
All 20th Century international and domestic wars = 35,654,000 killed;
And all major wars 1740-1997 = 20,000,000 killed.
Now tell me again, Irene Khan and William Schulz of AI, that Guantánamo is like Gulag
http://dailybork.blogspot.com/2005/06/40-million-but-its-just-statistic.html
So, Andrew, Rummel ascribes 13,053,000 of victims of World War II to the fault of the Soviet Union?!
He blames Russians for Hitler’s crimes? As I told you: Rummel is a fascist.
And everything else that you quote is just as ridiculous. For example:
“How many died in interrogation, and how many were subsequently executed overall, can only be a wild guess; I can find no overall estimates. … Some experts say 60,000,000. A Soviet scientist gives a research estimate of 52,000,000 to 54,000,000 for just the 1930s to 1950s. Solzhenitsyn claims 70,000,000. I calculate a most probable estimate of 39,464,000”
Every word in this paragraph is an insult to science. With you being an illogical construction engineer, I doubt that you can even understand how anti-scientific this is. He quotes people without giving any references. He talks about “a Soviet scientist” without even giving his name! There were millions of Soviet scientists, and each has his own opinion as to how many people died in GULAGs.
He starts by saying that there are no estimates and any estimate would be a “wild guess”, and then he gives us his precise estimate of 39,464,000. To the nearest thousand! But he gives no formula that explains this number. None. How did he derive it?
And finally, he claims: “Solzhenitsyn claims 70,000,000”. Solzhenitsyn claims that 70,000,000 were “murdered in Gulag”? Where did Solzhenitsyn write this? In which book/article? On what page?
“Have you ever actually read “The Gulag Archipelago”?”
Of course. Back in 1973, right after it came out in Samizdat, my parents read it and told ne the gist. And then in 1977-78 I read it myself.
Have you read it? On what page does he give this figure of 70 million people murdered in GULAG?
Rummel is not engaged in science. He is a voodoo propagandist.
Voice of Retardation, when it comes to the Russian government murder of its own citizens in wartime, there is a great deal of evidence, just look at all the deportations and mass murders of ethnic groups considered “unreliable”, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Finno-Ugrics, Volga Germans, Pontic Greeks, Turkomen etc etc etc.
Then there is the horrific behavior of the Russian state security apparatus towards those who suffered from Axis occupation, usually they too were deported to Siberia for “re-education through labor”.
Then there are the victims of being shot in the back by their own side, those unfortunate enough to be “encouraged” by the NKVD barrage battalions…
It may come as a surprise to a defender of Russian communist brutality such as yourself, but the Gulag system operated full force throughout the war.
In addition, I would request that you provide evidence that Conquest and others consider Rummel a “lying snake” or “despise him”.
Of course, you don’t have any, as you are a lying piece of filth.
By the way, you are the vodoo propagandist, posting pseudo scientific diatribes on behalf of a group of racist genocidal separatists who are internationally condemned for committing massive ethnic cleansing, and whose “evidence” is roundly condemned by historians and ethnographers world wide, as being fabricated racist propaganda of the worst sort.
You may as well post Nazi propaganda.
After all, Ardzinba was a disciple of Hitler.
Andrew, so how did Rummel “scientifically” arrive at his number of 13,053,000 of “domicide” victims in World War II? Where are his precise scientific” calculations?
And let me repeat: he writes: “How many died in interrogation, and how many were subsequently executed overall, can only be a wild guess; I can find no overall estimates. … Some experts say 60,000,000. A Soviet scientist gives a research estimate of 52,000,000 to 54,000,000 for just the 1930s to 1950s. Solzhenitsyn claims 70,000,000. I calculate a most probable estimate of 39,464,000”
Every word in this paragraph is an insult to science. With you being an illogical construction engineer, I doubt that you can even understand how anti-scientific this is. He quotes people without giving any references. He talks about “a Soviet scientist” without even giving his name! There were millions of Soviet scientists, and each has his own opinion as to how many people died in GULAGs.
He starts by saying that there are no estimates and any estimate would be a “wild guess”, and then he gives us his precise estimate of 39,464,000. To the nearest thousand! But he gives no formula that explains this number. None. How did he derive it?
And finally, he claims: “Solzhenitsyn claims 70,000,000″.
Let me repeat my questions:
1. Solzhenitsyn claims that 70,000,000 were “murdered in Gulag”? Where did Solzhenitsyn write this? In which book/article? On what page?
2. Who is this mysterious “Soviet scientist gives a research estimate of 52,000,000 to 54,000,000” for the number of GULAG victims? Is it by any chance Dyadkin, I.G. (Demograficheskaya statistika neyestestvennoy smertnosti v SSSR 1918-1956 ), who talks about 56 to 62 million “unnatural deaths” for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49 million under Stalin, of which 27 million “unnatural deaths” were from World War Two?
3. How exactly did Rumnmel derive his precise number of 39,464,000?
What kind of a “scientist” gives no references, and even refuses to give names of the experts whose numbers he claims to be quoting? Do you know the meaning of the term “scientist”? To me, Bagapsh is a much less lying and demagogic source than Rummel.
Once again, for you are obviously too stupid to understand, these quotes are from the introduction to his book.
Maybe if you read the whole thing, though this might be hard given your amazing inability to actually comprehend the written word, you might note the numerous footnotes and references….
And Voice Of Retardation, what is illogical about engineering? It is certainly more logical than being an economist, especially one such as yourself, who can’t even get basic facts right.
Such as the population of the City of Los Angeles for example, or the history of the Caucasus for another.
Hell, you even describe Tsarist Russia as a paradise for Jews……
Of course, considering your family were probably involved in Communist repressions, due to the fact that the Leninist and Stalininst secret police were dominated by your relatives, your defence of Communist crimes is understandable, while still being reprehensible.
Andrew wrote: “Maybe if you read the whole thing, though this might be hard given your amazing inability to actually comprehend the written word, you might note the numerous footnotes and references….”
That’s my whole point: I can’t find his “whole thing” on the Internet, and can’t find any good explanations as to how he computed his numbers, nor where the figure of 70 million for Solzhenitsyn came from.
But since you have read the “whole thing”, I have been asking you (for the third time) to answer my questions:
1. Solzhenitsyn claims that 70,000,000 were “murdered in Gulag”? Where did Solzhenitsyn write this? In which book/article? On what page?
2. Who is this mysterious “Soviet scientist gives a research estimate of 52,000,000 to 54,000,000″ for the number of GULAG victims? Is it by any chance Dyadkin, I.G. (Demograficheskaya statistika neyestestvennoy smertnosti v SSSR 1918-1956 ), who talks about 56 to 62 million “unnatural deaths” for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49 million under Stalin, of which 27 million “unnatural deaths” were from World War Two?
3. How exactly did Rumnmel derive his precise number of 39,464,000?
Why do you find it impossible to answer my questions, Andrew? Maybe you are lying that you have read and understood his “thing”?
Now ReTaRd, go through the tables he provides.
In addition, if you read Demograficheskaya statistika neyestestvennoy smertnosti v SSSR 1918-1956 by Dyadkin, you will note that the author attributes nearly half of the losses suffered by the USSR to internal oppression.
Once again ReTaRd, do you deny the horrific repression against national minorities committed by the Russian communist party in WW2?
Do you deny the continuation of the system of Gulags and state terror by the Russian communist party during WW2?
Please answer this simple question:
Can you provide any evidence that Conquest or any other historians consider Rummel a fraud as you state?
Or are you simply lying again?
Of course we all know what a liar you are so never mind
Andrew wrote:”Please answer this simple question”
Gladly. As soon as you answer my own three questions that you are trying to avoid. Here they are for the 4th time:
1. Solzhenitsyn claims that 70,000,000 were “murdered in Gulag”? Where did Solzhenitsyn write this? In which book/article? On what page?
2. Who is this mysterious “Soviet scientist gives a research estimate of 52,000,000 to 54,000,000″ for the number of GULAG victims? Is it by any chance Dyadkin, I.G. (Demograficheskaya statistika neyestestvennoy smertnosti v SSSR 1918-1956 ), who talks about 56 to 62 million “unnatural deaths” for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49 million under Stalin, of which 27 million “unnatural deaths” were from World War Two?
3. How exactly did Rumnmel derive his precise number of 39,464,000?
Why do you find it impossible to answer my questions, Andrew? Maybe you are lying that you have read and understood Rummel’s book?
Or are you simply lying again?
Yes, Andrew, why are you avoiding answering my 3 questions? Are you lying again?
@http://www.fuadiye.com/Bagapsh-3.html
A wild Bagapsh appears!
Dima M. debriefing his two “independent” warlords:
What do you see wrong with that picture of Bogapsh? Is it that he doesn’t look Aryan to you?
I see nothing wrong with Bogapsh’s facial expressions, especially when we look at the face of his nemesis:
You know ReTaRd, I am surprised you dont support your idol AH, after all, he was just “returning europe to its traditional ethnic balance” same as his disciple Ardzinba thought he was doing in Abkhazia.
After all, you should be in the ME shouldn’t you?
Excuse me mr ReTaRd, you show once again your lack of education.
That is Kokoity, the Ossetian “President”
And the “President” of Abkhazia is Sergey Bagapsh, not Bogapsh.
You are a mental pygmy
Andrew, the man in the videos that I posted, is neither Bagapsh nor Kokoity. This is Saakashvili.
Or are you talking to Robert, who wrote:
Robert // May 22, 2010 at 6:45 am
A wild Bagapsh appears!
http://media.stratfor.com/mmf/0/7/0771b6e9d61861615395b130afeb28585ffec2b4_two_column.jpg
Yes, you are right: your friend Robert did indeed confuse Bagapsh and Kakoity, and Robert is indeed a mental pygmy, although he is quite large compared to you.
Good work at making fun of your best friend, Andrew!
Now ReTaRd, you called him “Bogapsh”
You did not notice the difference.
You really are a pathetic little piece of inferior waste.
As evidence, you wrote What do you see wrong with that picture of Bogapsh? Is it that he doesn’t look Aryan to you?
I see nothing wrong with Bogapsh’s facial expressions, especially when we look at the face of his nemesis:
So ReTaRd, I am pointing out that you were unable to tell the difference, or spell the n ame properly.
Boy you are pathetic.
Besides, Robert was just winding you up, which is ridiculously easy to do, given your obvious lack of education, morals, intelligence, or honesty.
How many people did you and your obviously pro Stalinist parents dobb in to the KGB?
How many lives did you ruin in yoiur fanatical support of Russian imperialism?
How many Jews did you feed to the fires Capo?
Andrew,
Yes, I misspelled”Bogapsh” instead of “Bagapsh”. You have to understand that I don’t live in Georgia, where Bogapsh and Kokoity are shown on TV at least 100 times per day as the ultimate “devils”, as Hitler, Stalin and Genghiz Khan put together. Outside of Georgia, Ossetia and Abkhazia, almost nobody knows how to spell their names. So, like 99.9999% of other Americans, I don’t know how to spell their names and don’t intent to make an effort to learn.
You, on the other hand, constantly misspell the most simple English words. Just the other day you spelled the word “by” as “buy”, and explained to me that you confuse the words “by” and “buy” unless you pump a lot of tea into your system.
“How many Jews did you feed to the fires Capo?”
Don’t you think that this is a bit of an overreaction to my mistake of misspelling “Bagapsh” with an “o”? Is everybody, who makes a spelling error of some guy’s name in Ossetia, guilty of mass murder of Jews?
And please tell me, given your own misspelling of the word “by”, do you admit to “feeding Jews to the fires Capo”?
And what about your buddy Robert, who was the one who mistook Kokoity for Bagapsh. Are you saying that he too is a mass murderer of Jews?!
Look, whenever I talk to you and Bohdan, I feel like in a loony bin. Both of you are crazy idiots. Your idea that my misspelling of Bogapsh’s name implies that my Jewish parents and I are mass murderers of Jews – that is the stupidest thing I have ever read in my life.
Are you brain-dead, Andrew? Maybe you need some tea to realize what an ass you have just made of yourself?
Andrew wrote: “Besides, Robert was just winding you up, which is ridiculously easy to do
LOL. And I was just winding you up when I spelled “Bagapsh” with an “o”. And it worked: you went totally crazy and went so far in your hysterics that you accused my parents and me of mass murdering Jews. Or maybe your crazy tirades here were also attempts at “winding me up”?
Now Voice Of Retardation, you claim that you read Gulag Archipelago in 1978, and that your parents had the underground copy, how old were you when you came to the US?
As for not knowing how to spell his name because you are “an american”, sorry VOR, that don’t wash at all.
We all know you are a Russian nationalist, who claims to be Jewish when it suits him, and claims to be American when it suits him, but is in reality most likely not either.
I am just pointing out to you, that if you are a Jew, which I doubt, then you are the sort that was likely to have been either from an NKVD background, given your strange defence of communism and Russian imperialism, or the sort that collaborated with the camp guards.
In short, you are a despicable example of humanity.
The Jews I know who were fortunate enough to escape from Russia in the Soviet period are disgusted by vermin such as yourself.
Oh yes. The great Ossetian warlord Kokoity. Here are some remarkable pictures of him:
And out of his uniform and trying to look civilized:
And also his brave soldiers (many afraid to even show their faces while posing for a photo):
Pleae notice the great uniforms (EVERYTHING may be an Ossetian uniform). Of course, totally unmarked. Who even need any markings? Not the Ossetian soldiers! (Geneva what? To hell with conventions!)
At least Kokoity and some of his personal elite squad had something on his field cap, it’s rare (he also has great facial expression) and it’s enough, I guess:
And of course in the mids of their heroic actions, selflessly liberating Georgian houses while fighting the horrible Georgian genocide:
And just one more Kokoity, the rare two-and-half heads version:
You can just never have enough of Kokoity, the independent president of independent independence.
Meanwhile, the Russian “police” in Chechnya officially embark on a pogrom of families of so-called “foreign mercenaries” (coming “from Afghanistan, Pakistan”, of course):
Caucasian Knot
Head of Chechen MIA calls power agents to be more active with militants’ relatives
May 18 2010
In the end of last week, a meeting was held in Grozny dedicated to the outcomes of the work of the republic’s Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) for the first four months of this year. Minister Ruslan Alkhanov stated that relatives of the members of the armed underground are accomplices of their crimes; therefore, they should bear the same responsibility as militants.
Mr Alkhanov noted that President of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov had set the task of final liquidation of the remaining militants.
The Minister also demanded from city and district militia divisions to strengthen their work with the population. “Every bandit has his relatives and friends who help him with foodstuffs. By doing so, they become accomplices of the crimes committed by militants and, consequently, should bear same responsibility before the law. Their help to bandits is our drawback and our omission,” said Mr Alkhanov.
http://www.eng.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/13318/
I guess it’s part of the “more cruel measures” the “liberal” “president” Medvdev spoke of earlier this year:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/01/medvedev-promises-to-get-_n_521364.html
Chechen authorities are against Al Qaeda mercenaries and their illegal immigrant families?
Illegal Mexican immigrants are not related to Al Qaeda, yet the police in Arizona are required to arrest them.
I wonder how we, Americans, would feel if Al Qaeda terrorists started sneaking in their entire families into USA as illegal immigrants…
Oh, but that’s quite natural for Georgians to host AQ cells inside the country, so your sarcasm won’t be understood by Andrew.
I don’t think Robert is a Georgian. He is totally ignorant on Georgian/Ossetian/Abkhazian affairs. He can’t even tell Bagapsh from Kokoity.
Actually Voice of Retardation, you are the one who is totally ignorant about Georgian/Abkhazian/Ossetian affairs.
At least Robert understands the historical background, unlike yourself who ignores 2000 years of history and takes his info from the neo-fascist ravings of genocidal separatists.
Of course, this is not at all surprising given your support for ethnic cleansing and genocide by Russia and its puppets in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, and also by the Serbs in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
And as I recall, you could not tell the difference between Bagapsh (whom you called “Bogapsh”) and Kokoity……
Yes, Andrew, I am not Georgian/Abkhazian/Ossetian and indeed misspell “Bogapsh”, You, on the other hand, claim to be a native English speaker, and yet you can’t spell the most basic English, as in:
Andrew // May 20, 2010 at 8:10 am
Hi KGB, are you buy any chance married to FSB?
Hey, even native speakers make spelling mistakes.
LOL
However, you claim to be an Jew, and can’t even admit that Russian antisemitism exists…..
Andrew wrote: “Hey, even native speakers make spelling mistakes.”
Then why did you go hysterical over my misspelling “Bogapsh”:
Andrew // May 23, 2010 at 5:48 am
Now ReTaRd, you called him “Bogapsh”.
You really are a pathetic little piece of inferior waste. How many people did you and your obviously pro Stalinist parents dobb in to the KGB? How many lives did you ruin in yoiur fanatical support of Russian imperialism? How many Jews did you feed to the fires Capo?”
Whoa! Time to call the orderlies.
BTW, who is this “Capo” that you constantly talk about? Do you mean this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capo
A capo, or, rarely, capo tasto (from Italian capo, “head” and tasto, “tie or fret”) is a clamp-like device used on the neck of a stringed instrument to shorten the strings, hence raising the pitch. It is frequently used on guitars, mandolins, and banjos.
No, most probably he thought of “Kapo”, Kaitsepolitsei – the modern Estonian secret police. Have no idea, though, why he thinks you “feed” any Jews (???) to Kapo.
No, I meant this:
Guards and other assistants recruited from among the prisoners of Nazi Concentration camps were also referred to as a Kapo or Capo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caporegime#See_also
A Kapo was a prisoner who worked inside German Nazi concentration camps during World War II in certain lower administrative positions. The official Nazi word was Funktionshäftling, or “prisoner functionary”, but the Nazis commonly referred to them as kapos.
Etymology
The origin of “kapo” is unclear. Some think it is an abbreviated form of the word, Kameradschaftspolizei, (roughly, “comrade police force”) or comes from the Italian word for “head”, capo. According to the Duden, it is derived from the French word for “Corporal” (fr:Caporal)[1][2][3].
[edit]Reputation for brutality
Kapos received more privileges than normal prisoners, towards whom they were often brutal. They were often convicts who were offered this work in exchange for a reduced sentence or parole.
From Oliver Lustig’s Dictionary of the Camp:
Vicenzo and Luigi Pappalettera wrote in their book The Brutes Have the Floor [4] that, every time a new transport of detainees arrived at Mauthausen, Kapo August Adam picked out the professors, lawyers, priests and magistrates and cynically asked them: “Are you a lawyer? A professor? Good! Do you see this green triangle? This means I am a killer. I have five convictions on my record: one for manslaughter and four for robbery. Well, here I am in command. The world has turned upside down, did you get that? Do you need a dolmetscher, an interpreter? Here it is!” And he was pointing to his bat, after which he struck. When he was satisfied, he formed a Scheisskompanie with those selected and sent them to clean the latrines. [5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo_(concentration_camp)
Given your adulation of Russian crimes against humanity, and the ethnic cleansing and mass murder committed by Russian backed separatists, well the designation fits you perfectly.
“An Jew” is also quite a new word in English language:)
:)
But he knows how to spell “Bagapsh”.
The horror of the gulag is beyond comprehension. Camps were brutal, soul-destroying, ruled on behalf of guards by hard-core criminals. The journey to the camps was deadly and could last months. Outside work was compulsory until temperatures dropped below -50 *C. Inmates were starved and savaged by epidemics. Perhaps the best thing about them was that one would not be expected to survive more than two years. In Kolymev only three out of every hundred survived. From Novaya Zembla, nobody returned at all.
@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLPuRhGGPDM&feature=related
User description:
“Footage of Russian Airforce SU-25s attacking a Georgian column on the first day of the 5 day war in August 2008.”
@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ny4Fau-m6U&feature=related
Top rated comment:
“you are right man. stupid russians and ossetians was shooting their own military targets .”
@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZPgF5MhDxw&feature=related
Top rated comment:
“:D :D :D This isn’t Georgian plane… ”
OK. Let me ask again for the captured Georgian pilots and/or dead Georgian pilots (so many of them allegedly). Somehow we all have seen the dead and captured Russian pilots, and the dead and captured Georgian ground soldiers, and even stuff like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkx_jAGx06E too, but no Georgian pilots, why?
@’ve been looking for hours now and I finally found a source which proves the Tu22M3 was used for a bombing run
A Russia pdf. I’m thrilled!
@The Russian bomber was conducting a top secret bombing mission, who’s existence was only announced a month after the war by ITAR TASS (confirmed by the actual chief Zelin), it was told to the media that it was running a reconnaissance mission, and you so easily believed it.
Lol. Something like the ever-changing story of “Hill 776” (“At first we said only a few soldiers died, than we admitted it was over a plenty, but they killed over 1 million Chechens, and we couldn’t say this from the beginning because of top secrecy, btw this number of the dead Chechens is over 1 billion now and rising every year.”)?
Or like the “top secrecy” made them claim 1,400 or 2,100 Ossetian civilians were killed in the very first hours of the “Georgian genocide”?
Btw, I just couldn’t care less about what “the actual chief Zelin” says. When I quoted him last time it was to indicate what he has admitted, because the reality is much worse (that is worse for the Russian military, but better for the world, and for Russian people too).
And no, he didn’t say anything like “Russian contract pilots receive 10,000 rubles monthly and receive 70-120 flight hours annually” like you claimed (and even 120 hours would be VERY low, but anyway).
This is what he actually said (in 2009):
Moreover, Zelin said Russian air force pilots at present fly an average of 60-70 hours annually, which represents an improvement on the lower standards of the 1990s but is less than half the North Atlantic Treaty Organization minimum of 180 hours, which is often much higher within many of the member states’ air forces. The reduction in the numbers of flight personnel and improved fuel supplies has contributed to this higher figure.
Zelin admitted that young lieutenants currently fly an average of 20-30 hours annually, while they are faced with the prospect of serving in remote bases on no more than 15,000-20,000 rubles (US$628) annually.
Sunshine, there were thousands Georgian and non-Georgian sources claiming Georgian aviation was destroyed.
You. of course, claim it wasn’t.
Mate, so what’s the current number of Georgian Su25’s, and if they were not destroyed during the war, then where are they now?
Dmitry,
Only a stupid Russian ape like yourself would continue to stubbornly deny that Georgia, under the brilliant command of Generalissimus “little Stalin” Saakashvili, defeated Russia in the August 2008 war and penetrated deep into Russian territory.
Oh, how true. Poor stupid me.
I think I’ve missed the fact Misha the Gatherer of Georgian lands really defeated Russia.
:D