On 6/2/2016 9:52 PM, Greg Chalik wrote:

Richard,

I am not Russian.

Odd. Your past posts have definitely implied this. And your below seems to reinforce it.

Russia lost its status as an Empire in 1918; the USSR won the Second World War.

Are you're really trying to pretend that Russia wasn't top dog/shotcaller in the for-all-intents-and-purposes-empire that went by the euphemistic title "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?"

If so, then go ahead. Pull the other one.

You confuse nationalism with patrior[t]ism and cultural memory.

I strted to respond with definitions of those three terms, in order to demonstrate that the distinctions between these extremely subtle and - for the purposes of this discussion - can not be said to truly apply.

But then I remembered that you have no trouble disputing even definitions assigned by Websters.

So what's the point?us posts - I suspect that the country immigrated to was not the U.S.

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 10:02 PM, Kurt Feltenberger <xxxxxx@thepaw.org> wrote:

One could argue that Russia is currently acting as if it were an empire.

One most definitely could. Particularly if one were Ukrainian. Or - indeed - a citizen of any of the former Warsaw Pact countries which joined NATO following the collapse of that "voluntary" association (or petitioned to do so).

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 10:02 PM, Kurt Feltenberger <xxxxxx@thepaw.org> wrote:

And even though the Soviet Union was victorious in WW2, Russia was part of the USSR as its own republic within the USSR.

And - as I noted above - Russia was the shotcaller within that union, rather as if (say . . .) Texas were the defacto ruling state of the U.S.

BTW, the lost Russian empire I was referring to (of course) was not the collapse of Imperial Russia but rather the collapse of the USSR and consequently the Warsaw Pact.

Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein

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