Credits: Hunterok
Given recent events in Ukraine, I thought I would do a quick write up of some regional lore. In Eastern Europe there is a story of a father, Pan. Scholars debate whether is is the Pan of Hellenic lore. I like to think it is. In fact I like to think he’s a grandson of Noah or something like that.
Pan had three sons, as many of these genealogies do:
Lech, father of the Polack Tribes
Czech, father of the Southern Slavic tribes
Rus, father of the Russian tribes.
Pan’s land, called Pannonia by the Romans, was the valley which existed snugly between the Alps and the Carpathians, that curious serpentine mountain to the east.
The three sons, as many of these stories go, did not know how to divide their father’s land. But while most stories end with a partitioning of land, the three brothers Pan chose a different path. They all agreed to share their land. Instead, they would divide the game on the land. Various traditions exist as to what game were divided by who, and I couldn’t care less what one is true. What’s important here is the foundational myth that the land is everyone’s, but what’s on the land is not everyone’s.
This is a very different approach to land ownership than the rest of Europe. It likely predisposed the Slavic people to various forms of socialism and Marxism in one way or another. You can see it in everything, from their inability to form a queue, to their incompetence in dealing with foreign conquerors. But in the post-soviet era, it results in a very strange entanglement of trans-national oligarchic interests with formal governing bodies. And of course, slavs did not actually come from the Carpathian basin, but across it. Likely applying the mythology onto what they found.
The Slavic people have always struggled with the concept of a border, and western ideologies of sovereignty. By now the popular myth of Ukraine meaning something like borderland or frontier has become a running joke in the west. A whole country naming itself the border of another country. Imagine if the US state of Montana decided to call itself “The Border”. The implication being, without the United States, Montana doesn’t have a right to exist. Russians often view Ukraine with the same big-brother eyes. Without Russia, Ukraine would just be Polish and Romanian.
Peter Hitchens has a running observation about the slavic people as well: They have no word for safety. Instead, they negate the word for danger. безопасность, or bezopasnost, is a compound of bez, which means not, and opasnost, which means danger. Imagine the psychology that is generated from this fact. For English speakers, the term safety is defined and exists independently. For Russians, negating implies work. The result is: For English people, peace and safety is the natural order. It takes a work to make things dangerous. For slavic peoples, danger is the normative condition, it takes work to negate the danger. Peter Hitchens argues that this fundamental understanding of reality, a product of history and geography for both peoples, is why the Russians always shoot first. Always. There should be no surprise here that when pushed by the west, Putin shot first. Because he has it in his mind that he must do the work of negating the danger, whereas NATO has in their minds, the idea they must preserve the peace. How these conceptualizations of work done onto the natural state of reality are a direct consequence of the ethno-linguistic understanding of reality itself.
Now, I don’t put a huge weight behind Mr Hitchen’s views on that. It’s cool, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a bit much. In the contemporary information age, sufficient pathways of comparison and understanding exist that all unique experiences of language are dissolving. The global consumer is replacing them. And that’s probably more why Putin acted than not.
Rus is said to have had a number of children which he named after colors. This is likely derived from Mongolian mythology, as the colors represent cartesian directions. There is likely some Turkish influence here, given they were once a part of the Mongol hoard and appear to have labeled things similarly. Somewhere between the Mongol conquests and Turkish naming schemes, the mythology of Rus’ children is born.
Belu Rus, or white russian, became Belarus.
Chervonnaya Rus, or Red Rus, would develop into Ukraine.
Black Rus became the Northern regions around St petersburg
And Blue Russia was simply Russia. It never had the defining term blue in its name though.
Together, the region of the rus was known as Ruthenia in ancient times.
We can from these terms start to comprehend how Ruthenia’s colorful coordination continue to shape regional politics. Although Rus’ children war between each other, and their cousins continue to pick winners, it’s worth investigating where concepts of home, border, and stranger stem from. The goal of reunifying Ruthenia, and in turn the continued Commonwealth of Pan’s children, will shape politics for generations to come. It’s probably worth coming to peace that they don’t operate in the Westphalian conception of sovereign statehood.