Немного русофобии в ленту

[leblon]

"Another Russian traveler, Pavel Sumarokov, following the same route in 1803, also considered Lyptsi a border settlement; for him, the striking differences between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians probably were not such well-known facts ... otherwise he would hardly have given free rein to his emotions and eloquence, describing how “in the tidy and merry house I find different faces, different habits, different clothes on the owners, different arrangements, and hear a different language. Can it be that this marks the boundary of the empire? Am I not entering another state?"... The historian and diplomat Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamensky, passing through the Sloboda region six years after Sumarokov, in 1809, also delineated the ethnographic boundary between Ukrainian and Russian settlements quite clearly but located it “thirty-five versts from Kursk”: “In the free settlement of Medvenka, where I changed horses, I saw for the first time Little Russian cottages whitened with clay inside and outside. This free settlement . . . is inhabited entirely by Little Russians.. . . When I asked one of the local peasants why their homes were whitened with clay, he answered me: ‘We are not like the Muscovites; we like cleanliness.’”

(Volodymer Kravchenko, "Kharkov/Kharkiv: A Borderland Capital", 2nd edition).

Comments

[alexanderr]

Engels, a medium size town across the river from Saratov, has a sizable German population (since 1700's). when passing through Engels on a bus one can immediately and unmistakably, instantly identify "German" streets. they seem so impossibly nice and clean. the contrast is so sharp, it is hard to describe, you have to see it for yourself. and note that we are talking literally adjacent, neighboring streets in the same town. how different can they be? oh man, night and day. night and effing day

[juan_gandhi]

Exactly. Similar to what I observed in the '70s, crossing the then imaginary border between Belgorod region and Ukraine.

[juan_gandhi]

Imagine, you can still observe this in Cincinnati, a former 90+% German town - even in the Black quarters. People sit on their porches and look at their clean streets. So different from East Palo Alto.