Alexey Smirnov's blog

When I lived in Finland I visited every castle it had: Hameenlinna, Savonlinna, Turku Castle, and Suomenlinna. I liked those trips a lot because every castle had a museum which always mentioned connection to Russian history.

Nowadays I am living in Russia and therefore I used an opportunity to visit a monastery located on the other bank of Oka river on which our town is situated. In order to get there I got an inexpensive boat for only 2,500 roubles (approximately 70 USD). It is funny that all the other boats of similar size costed three times as much! The name of the boat is Challenger 2.

Oka is a wide slowly moving river with almost no boat traffic. It is funny that we had some kind of cruise boats until very recently when the river transporation in Dzerzhinsk was apparently stopped. Quite sad, but the river looks nowadays as wild as it probably looked in 15th century when the monastery was built.

Previously I visited the ruins of the monastery when I was in high school. Back then the frames of 17th century buildings were still there but the interiors were destroyed as a result of October revolution of 1917. The actual destruction was happening probably later on, in the end of 1920s. After years of oblivion, the rebuilding of monastery began in 2000s.

The monastery is located in the middle of the hills which are approximately 150-200 m in height and are quite steep. The horizontal area in the middle accomodated three churches as well as entrance gates and cemetery. It was a very densely packed area. But nowadays only one church has been rebuilt along with a bell tower. During last few years I have visited a number of monasteries many of which have been destroyed during Soviet era. It keeps me wondering over and over again that what was destroyed during a couple of days takes decades to rebuild.

I have looked at old photographs of the monastery. It turns out that the new white building on the photograph above is actually smaller than its predecessor. In particular, the old building was 3-storied whereas the new one has only 2 floors. I was suprised when I discovered what I thought was negligence to the history but then my mom exlained to me that they don’t have enough donation nowadays to build as large a building as they did in 1600s. It is a worrying sign that back then one merchant called Dudin donated enough money to build the whole monastery but these days Russian people as a whole are not willing to donate as much.

But still, it is good that such a large-scale effort is going on. The rebuilding of monastery has a few additional tasks associated with it such as building a road to this remote area. It turns out that this sparked intense discussion in the media because the machines used in this process have excavated the ground and part of an old cemetery. Now I think that it is a good idea to perform a careful examination of the soil which contains 600 years of Russian history. If a team of archeologists attempted to do a field trip to this monastery I think they would find lots of artifacts.

On my way back I discovered another artifact on the shore of the river which I cannot think the meaning of. To me it looks like organ pipes but obviously Catholic Church never managed to get that far. Therefore, the pipes pictured above have some technical meaning. To summarize, Dudin monastery is a great remote place. Every human will find interesting stuff here, either historical or technical mysteries.

I have read another book in the series of New Chronology. This one deals with the history of Russia of XIII century. According to the traditional history Mongols conquered it and imposed a severe tax. However, the authors claim that Russia and Mongols was the same country which population included people living permanently at one location as well as nomads or Tatars.

If Russia and Mongolia was the same country and there was no fighting between them then it was quite a powerful empire because its area exceeded today’s Russia. Thus, it could threaten Europe and even conquer it which the authors claim was indeed the case.

The authors analyze the state seal of Tzar Ivan Grozny. It mentions several areas, for example Perm and Vyatka. However, in XVI century when the State Seal was used these towns simply did not exist yet! What a contradiction in the modern history which was obviously distorted. According to it, Perm and Vyatka at their present locations were only founded in XVII century as small wooden towns. On the State Seal of Ivan IV these towns are depicted as big castles that were conquered with a big effort. Therefore, the State Seal mentions totally different Perm and Vyatka as we understand them nowadays. The authors say that those cities were in fact strongholds of Western Europe. In other words, Romanovs’ historians reflected the map of Europe around a vertical axes going through Moscow to make it seem as if their predecessors were fighting long wars with Siberians. Needless to say, Siberia was not populated during those times at all, stone castles never existed there.

The locations of other cities were also moved when Romanovs’ deposed earlier Russian-Mongol kings. The authors claim that earlier Empire was the center of civilization which owned and connected Europe with Asia using the Silk Way.

Authors make an interesting observation. In Europe only very noble people had silk cloths. In Russia every soldier had a silk shirt. In both cases its purpose was to protect the human from insects as silk is known to repel them.

Russia-Mongolia got enormously rich because of their conquests and trade taxes that they imposed. For example, a 15-20% silver tax was widely used in Russian markets. Europeans brought their big silver coins called talers and received local currency kopeika which was much smaller. Only local currency was allowed in Russia.

This model actually correlates very well with Russian mentality. If you think of Russians as slaves who worked from dawn to dusk to pay the huge Mongolian tax then how would you explain the traditional Russian laziness which is so widespread in Russian fairytales? It is known that Russian people were spending half of their lives lying on their warm stoves. This is because there always was a stable source of income which was the silver tax they received from Europeans.

But after a while Europeans got tired of the ever increasing taxes that Russians demanded and staged a coup to replace Russian-Mongol king with pro-Western Romanovs. This theory looks very plausible.

To summarize, another great history book which sheds light on Russia-Europe relations and explains Russian mentality. It explains lots of historical mysteries as well. The history demystified.

Information in English: Fomenko, Nosovsky. New chronology.

This is an amazing book that sheds light on the true Russian history. Its main idea is that the official Russian history was created when Romanov dynasty came to power. As usual, it presents its predecessors as total barbarians and claims that they are the only legitimate rulers of the empire. The authors claim that the official history is totally wrong.

Why should one trust the authors of the book who describe such an unusual version of Russian history? To start with, the authors are world-known mathematicians who at least have common sense and posses logical skills. Second, the Soviet history of Russia taught us an important lesson when all the Romanovs’ history was denied and Tzars were described as barbarians. Therefore, Romanovs could have done the same. Finally, the authors unveil lots of contradictions between the official Romanov history and the artifacts of that period, for example widespread usage of arabic languages and muslim worships in Russia.

The authors give one example which explains why we should challenge the official state of history of any country. There was an exhibition of golden artifacts whose age was estimated as more than 2,000 years. The exhibition was held in one of the most respected Russian museums so it is likely that many professionals have evaluated the items on display.

When the authors visited the exhibition they spotted a message. They asked the organizers which language it is written in. The answer was that that is an old forgotten language. But the authors looked carefully at it and realized that it was written in Russian as it was in 17th century! The message was describing the owner of the item. Therefore, an item presumably 2,000 years old was only 400 years old! Would not that change the history of the whole period that the artifact belongs to? Is it reasonable to suspect now that the events of that period were taking place not 2,000 years ago but only 400 years ago?

The book starts with analyzing a well-known Dark Period of Russian history. The authors reconstruct the heritage tree of those Tzars and conclude that Dmitri was a legitimate Tzar and that Romanovs were not legitimate.

Then the authors analyze what happened after Romanovs got to power. There were a number of peasant uprisings. But never ever in Russian history were peasants that well organized to pose a threat to Tzar. In 1917 those were soldiers that suffered a number of defeats in WW1, not peasants. The authors conclude that those guys were soliders as well, but they belonged to a different country that Romanovs were trying to destroy. That other country was Mongolia, the authors claim that before Romanovs become Tzars this was a united Russia-Mongolia country with a capital in Astrahan, nowdays a city in delta of Volga river.

The books describes an enormous amount of work that the authors did with artifacts many of which had arabic messages. Romanov history simply ignores all those artifacts! Indeed, according to the official history Russian Orthodox Christianity was the only religion and Cyrillic was the only language.

The authors claim that Muslim religion as well as Arabic language was one of the state languages in Russia until 17th century. One explanation of this phenomenon is that Russia and Turks were friendly countries, not bloody enemies as Romanov history tries to persuade.

The amazing results that authors achieved using just common sense and logic have changed my attitude toward various kinds of Russian history exhibitions. From now on I will look carefully at every artifact and try to recognize Arabic text in them which I am sure I have seen a lot. It just never ocurred to me that the official history was so misleading.

I am very impressed with this book even if what is says is not totally true. I do believe that a large percentage of what the authors claim is true. This is a book that will change your perception of the official history of Russia as well as many other countries.

During one of the first weekends in Helsinki I decided to go to Tallinn which is located right across Helsinki. It takes 1,5 hours to get there which is quite fast. For example, it takes almost 2 hours to get to Tampere or Turku, the closest big cities. In other words, you would expect lots of similarities between Tallinn and Helsinki but the two cities are totally different.

When I arrived at the pier and tried to get the tickets of a fast Linda Line boat I was told that one of its engines was not working thus it would take nearly 3 hours to get to Tallinn. I bought the tickets anyway as the day was nice and I thought I would rather enjoy the sea. Also, I upgraded the tickets to the Linda class which offers snacks and dinner for a low price as well as a glass of wine.

I purchased two additional things. One of them is Tallinn card which is available in a number of formats starting from 6 hours and up to 48 hours. It allows to get access to lots of museums and offers various kinds of discounts in shops. So I got a 6-hour card. Another thing was Estonian money but later I found out that Euros were widely accepted as well.

After arriving to Tallinn I had to walk through a factory to get to the Old Town wall. Once you enter the Old Town you find yourself in a totally different country. There are lots of very old buildings and they are well preserved. Tallinn’s main problem during medieval times was protecting itself from various kinds of enemies. This is why there are so many observation towers in the town. Almost every church has a tower. There are lots of churches of various religions. There is a Russian-Orthodox church in which Russian Patriarch Alexey II worked for a long time. I guess the unique atmosphere of Tallinn in which lots of cultures could co-exist shaped up his views on the direction in which he led Russian people. Tzar Nicholas II visited the church with his family.

A long wall surrounds the city. It is funny that people made living rooms inside the wall. There are lots of towers in this wall. In a typical Russian kremlin the distance between the towers is 100-200 meters. In Tallinn the distance between the towers is twice as short. It is nice that the wall and almost every tower are opened for the public. Each tower has a number of floors. Narrow staircases lead there. They are quite steep so that climbing a tower is like climbing a mountain. Everything is made of stone. This is an indication of the old age of the construction because during more recent times bricks were used. Indeed, the first towers were constructed in 1300s.

During my visit to Tallinn I was climbing various towers. Initially I wanted to visit museums but I got quite tired after a while and decided to have dinner. After that I decided to visit an old monastery but when I got there it turned out that it was closed. As it was already evening I went to the pier and got on a boat back to Helsinki. I enjoyed my trip to Tallinn a lot and I certainly want to visit it again because there are still lots of must-see attractions that I did not have time to visit, for example a house in which Peter the Great lived. Again, lots of Russian history in a European town.

On the streets of Tallinn it is possible to meet Russian people, not only tourists but native residents as well. During Soviet times lots of people were moved to Estonia. It is thus even more surprising how this country managed to preserve its unique gorgeous style.

The gallery is here.

It has been a week after I returned from vacation. However, I was busy with relocating to Helsinki which I will describe shortly. Now I got spare time to write a trip report on my vacation to Russia where I stayed the whole July.

As I have not been in Russia for a year and a half except a short visit last summer I found out that lots of things have changed. In particular, the street on which I grew up has been improved a lot. New apartment buildings were constructed as well as few supermarkets. Here are the pictures of so to say modern Russian architecture.

After staying in my home town Dzerzhinsk for a week I went to Nizhny Novgorod. I wanted to go there earlier but surprisingly I had lots of things to do such as reading books and watching TV so the visit has been postponed. I have described my visit to Nizhny Novgorod in the previous post.

During my stay in Russia we had two wonderful field trips to historical monuments. One of them is Makarjevskij monastery established in 1415. It is located on Volga river, nowdays nuns are living there. The amount of work that they are doing is impressive. But there are lots of things to do to restore the old image of the monastery after destruction it had undergone through during Soviet times. Here is a Photosynth of a part of the monastery.

Another visit was to Suzdal established in 1024, what was claimed in Soviet Union as a historically preserved town. In fact, half of it was destroyed during October revolution and once again there is a lot of work to do to truly restore its old glorious image. Suzdal was an important city of ancient Russia. Here is a Photosynth of Suzdal’s Kremlin.

During my stay in Russia the weather was surprisingly hot. In the evenings we used to go swimming in a lake. Also, I have read two books: the diary of Dostoevsky which I call his blog even though there was no Internet at that times and diary of Bunin.

After visiting several bookstores I have bought the following books.

Also, I have watched the History of Soviet Union, a multi-episode TV show that a prominent Russian journalist Leonid Parfenov has created. It is called Namedni 1961-2003.

We have also visited quite a few relatives. It was a lot of fun to see them after so long.

Here is part 2 of the description of my trip to Savonlinna. Earlier in part 1 I described getting to Savonlinna and walk around the castle.

On the next day the castle opened and I went into it. Upon entering you can see a huge statue of St Olaf.

Then the guided tour goes up to the middle level. From there it is possible to see the inner court. Then the tour goes up to the towers. Earlier there were five towers in the castle but two of them were destroyed. In part this is due to prominent history of the castle. During numerous wars the castle was sieged a number of times. Their duration and severity varied. During one siege a huge hall in the wall between two towers was made after two thousands canon shots were fired.

There is a whole maze inside the castle. This is why going on the upper level is allowed only with a guide. After the one-hour guided tour ends tourists are told that it is possible to explore the ground levels on your own but you cannot go into towers. This is a bit frustrating because there are so many things to see in those towers!

After the not so long tour of the castle I went to explore the lake system on a boat trip. A variety of them are offered. The lakes span huge territory reaching Russian border areas. Earlier it was an important trade route.

I went to a 1.5 hour cruise on a steamboat. It goes through a beautiful archipelago with a thousand of islands. I guess earlier it was a convenient area for independent people because it was possible to live free on any of these islands. Most of the islands are habitable these days, that is a number of cottages are visible on the shore. But I wonder if they have electricity and water supply.

After looking at the archipelago I wonder why that particular island was chosen as the location of the castle. There are bigger islands, thus it was possible to build a bigger castle. Olavinlinna is a strong castle but it is quite small. In case of a war not too many people would find protection in it. This only means that the surrounding villages would get destroyed. In Russia, each major city had a Kermlin – a strong castle which size was 5-10 times the size of Olavinlinna. I also noticed that the elevation of the island on which Olavinlinna is situated is low. Going on the neighboring island lifts you above the walls of the castle.

Thus to me Ovalininna looked like a Trojan horse. It is attractive because it was a stronghold situated on an important trade route but it is an easy vulnerable target. The history proved that as the ownership of the castle was transferred many times during its prominent history.

There is a museum of history in Savonlinna but it was closed when I visited the city. Thus, after visiting Olavinlinna I have more questions than answers. The castle hides lots of mysteries within its walls.

View test in a larger map

Juhannus is the mid-summer celebration. The tradition is that people go on various trips on this holiday. So I decided to go to Savonlinna, a town in Eastern Finland to check out the only castle that I have not visited yet – Olavinlinna. As usual, taking train was the cheapest and fastest option. However, the above map shows that there is no direct train between Tampere and Savonlinna. The train network is going pretty much in north-south direction with short distance connecting trains that allow to jump between one branch and another. In this trip I had to take four trains which sounds like a crazy idea. In addition, the day before the departure an accident happened on Tampere-Helsinki branch, thus the delays were introduced.

So I started the trip 10 minutes late. The chances to make it to the first connection were really minor because the time between the trains was only 6 minutes. Thus the whole trip was in danger. Of course, I thought of back up plans but it would not make me happy to start the trip with a backup plan. But it was amazing how well the railroad network adapted to this delay. Basically, it was propagated to all related trains. I guess the algorithm that controls this network has a notion of relevant train. For example, if lots of people are expected to change trains at a certain station at a certain time then the connecting train waits for all the incoming trains. It is an interesting algorithmic problem.

I was also impressed with the extremely mobile connecting trains. It can have as few as just one car as this connecting train in Savonlinna.

Because of that, I made all connections on time! I could not believe it but I arrived to Savonlinna as planned! I stayed in a hotel with swimming pool and spas situated on a lake. Upon arrival I checked out its saunas. Nice place. Then in the evening I went to the town and walked around the castle. Because of the holiday it closed earlier in the afternoon thus I only walked outside. The castle is very impressive. It is built on an island which is basically rock. It occupies the whole island in order to prevent the medieval warriors from getting hold of it. During the opening hours a bridge connects it with the mainland. I did not take a boat trip around the castle. Instead, I jumped from one island to another taking pictures.

I like building 3D models of various castles and churches but this time I used Nokia Maps 3.0 on my Nokia 5800 to get the model of the castle. Surprisingly, the map is not aware of the island which the castle is built on, it is showing it on the water.

Check out the following images of the gorgeous castle!

After the initial idealistic attempts of building socialist states and subsequent efforts to survive in inefficient economy, the African countries had to ask for help from the World Bank.

Senegal in 1979 became the first African state to obtain a structural adjustment loan from the World Bank. One by one others followed. In the early 1980s the Western donor communities believed that they were dealing with a short-term phenomenon. But it soon became apparent that Africa faced a permanent crisis.

By the end of 1980s after a decade of structural adjustment little had changed for the better. Per capita income in black Africa was lower than it had been in 1960.

The World Bank advocated more political freedom including privatization of state-owned factories. In practice that allowed the dictators to distribute the wealth among their relatives using World Bank’s money. In other words, they learned to build facades of democracy, but the life of ordinary people in this new democracy did not change.

To change the situation it was necessary to allow people to express their opinions. Traditionally, each state employed one-party model. The call for a multi-party democracy was made. Obviously, the dictators opposed such attempts. There were exceptions but honest elections often initiated furious fighting

Nigeria’s military leader General Babangida had been detrimental to the evolution of good government. Against all odds, unlike previous occasions the 1993 presidential election was conducted in peaceful manner. The unofficial results showed a clear victory of opposition’s leader Abiola. A few days later the government declared that in order to prevent judicial anarchy it had annulled the election results. As Nigeria descended into violence, Babangida’s own position became untenable and he resigned as president. General Sani Abacha staged a palace coup and demolished all democratic institutions. His dictatorship was to become more feared than anyting that had hitherto occurred.

Even thought many dictators were removed from offices in 1990s and multi-party elections became possible, the new generation of dictators emerged.

In place of Big Man rule came Big Man democracy, with little difference between the two.

In this post I will review parts 2 and 3 of the book. In the previous part of the review I have described attempts to build socialist states.

Dictatorship was however a more common option. Quite many of the dictators were evil people but there were exceptions as well. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was good enough to survive his own deposition. Before that, he stayed in power for nearly 60 years. What is funny is that his real last name Makonnen is a very popular Finnish last name.

What helped to sustain his power was the considerable extent to which the emperor owned and controlled land and livelihood of millions of peasants. About three-quaters of peasants were tenants. Tenants were required to pay 75 per cent of their produce to landlords, to provide free labour for the landlord’s farm, free transport for his crops, free service as domestic servants, cooks, and guards.

He did not trust anybody. He operated by memory and relied on a vast spy networks that briefed him daily.

Haile Selassie spent the last months of his life imprisoned in rooms of Grand Palace. He continued to get up at dawn, attend morning mass and spent much time reading.

Imposing huge taxes was one option for ruling a dictatorship state.

Oil-producing countries such as Nigeria, Gabon, Congo-Brazzavville, Algeria, and Libya reaped fortunes from the oil bonanza. But the Nigerian example showed how quickly oil wealth could be dissipated. After annual revenues soaring from $4 billion to $26 billion corruption reached new heights. Huge salaries increases were awarded to public servants. Vast sums were spent on imported consumer goods. In 1979 Nigeria had international reserves of $5.8 billion. In 1980 its external debt stood at $18 billion.

Only a few countries such as Kenya, Cameroon, Malawi, and notably Cote d’Ivoire were able to maintain steady growth. Their economies were based on agriculture.

In the first two decades after independence, Cote d’Ivoire’s annual growth was more than 7 per cent a year, placing it at the top fifteen countries in the world.

I am reading a monumental book of Martin Meredith that described the history of Africa of the second half of the 20th century. After the collapse of Russian Empire and two world wars the world powers decided to change the shape of the continent. With that pre-history in mind, the fate of each African country is a variation of the fate of larger empires that collapsed. In other words, Russia might have become any of the African countries and in fact it resembles a few of them or the other way round.

The pace of African history is so dynamic that few people were able to adapt to it. This is why the history of Africa has lots of examples when great established politicians failed while novice and ambitious people reached unprecedented power.

Given the history of dictatorship in Russia it was interesting to see how African leaders ruled in similar circumstances of disaster, famine, and threats from competitors.

Kwame Nkrumah a charismatic leader of Ghana had socialist views in the beginning saying that

Socialism is the only pattern that can within the shortest possible time bring good life to people

However, he decided to establish his own ideology called Nkrumahism that nobody understood. It was only said that Nkrumahism is a complex political and social philosophy.

In reality his state was based on corruption when each minister charged 10% from government contracts.

The crowning folly of Nkrumah’s regime was Job 600, the construction of grand complex of buildings for a single conference of OAU heads of state in 1965, costing 10 million pounds. Yet the conference turned into an abject failure. Because Nkrumah’s foreign policy had alienated so many governments, a large number of African leaders were reluctant to attend.

Nkrumah’s downfall came not as a result of Ghana’s desperate economic plight, or high-level corruption, or government mismanagement, but because of his fatal decision to interfere with the military.

Another country adopting socialism was Tanzania after ruling of Julius Nyerere. He insisted on the importance of self-development instead of relying on foreign aid:

It is stupid to rely on money as the major instrument of development when we know only too well that our country is poor. There is no country in the world which is prepared to give us gifts and loans, or establish industries. Independence means self-reliance.

His idea was to build collective villages out of farms. But people were unwilling to joins those ujamaa’s. Is not it similar to Soviet kolhoz? A rich farmer did not want to share his wealth with poor neighbor. But how differently has Nyerere approached this problem! Instead of forcing people he offered community service such as schools, hospitals for free to those who built an ujamaa. But that idea did not work out. In addition, bureaucracy has risen dramatically.

The pyrethrum board, for example, spent more on its administrative costs in 1980 than the total value of the crop it purchased. Farmers meanwhile were offered inadequate prices and faced long delays in payment, sometimes lasting up to one year, and eventually they resorted to using the black market.

After years of fruitless attempts Nyerere acknowledged that the country was neither socialist nor self-reliant.

Much was achieved as a result of Nyerere’s efforts, notably in the fields of education, health and social services. Primary school enrollment increased from one-quarter to 95%, three in ten villages had clinics. Yet what progress was made was financed largely by foreign aid. During 1970s Tanzania received $3 billion from the West. In 1982 the annual level reached $600 million.