Soviet Union's role in ending WWII

Good article on http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100815/ap_on_re_us/wwii_forgotten_battle . It is amazing to see it appear in an American newspaper, serving one of the most brainwashed populaces in the world. I must admit, it's true and unbelievably, miraculously printed in my local paper today. Wow! A praise of Soviet Union's Red Army. I'm shocked.
However, the point should have been not as much about fear of the Japanese but of the substance of the soviet contribution to the victory in Asia. I know from some recent memoirs of the soviet soldiers in China that there was strong desire of the Japanese  to surrender to the soviets and therefore avoid the pitchforks of the Chinese peasants. It's a fact: Japanese occupation in China, Korea and elsewhere in the pacific Asia is still a very raw memory.
Soviet Army advanced (in some instances) 2000 km in two weeks through dry desert with no water, climbed steep Hinging Mountains, fought through rice fields, drove through towns and cities and went up the rivers in Manchuria. The largest field army of the Japanese Empire was destroyed, almost a million men and their tanks, artillery, planes.
That advance convinced Japan to surrender. Americans had plans to fight all through 1946. Soviet Union weighed in and the war was over. Atomic bomb had much lesser influence. American tried to bomb Germany and Japan into submission for years and could not do so. Why nuclear attack was to be perceived different by the government of Japan? Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan - they were bombed the hell out but until ground troops rolled in - there was no victory. Soviet Union rolled in its ground forces (fulfilling its ally obligation) - and Japan caved.
 Memory eternal to all whose graves are all over China and Korea. They made it happen.

Russian Garmon' ( button accordeon), simplified cousin of Bayan.

Russian webspace went crazy last week over a 6-month-old YouTube clip with a song that's even older, performed by an actor from Saint Petersbourg Igor Rasteryayev:



Song itself  is great, hence the sudden popularity due to a posting on dirty.ru, but I wanted to say  a few words about the instrument that Igor is using there. Lirycs and melody are subject of much more explanation themselves. Too much.

Here's some Wiki about "garmon (Russian: гармонь) is a kind of Russian button accordion, a free-reed wind instrument. A garmon has two rows of buttons on the right side, which play the notes of a diatonic scale, and at least two rows of buttons on the left side, which play the primary chords in the key of the instrument as well as its relative harmonic minor key. Many instruments have additional right-hand buttons with useful accidental notes, additional left-hand chords for playing in related keys, and a row of free-bass buttons, to facilitate playing of bass melodies.

The garmons can be of two major classes: unisonoric, meaning that each button plays the same note or chord when the bellows is being expanded as it does when compressed, and bisonoric, in which the note depends on the direction of the bellowswork. Examples of unisoniric type are livenka (ливенка, after Livny, Oryol Oblast) and Khromka (Russian: Хромка, for "chromatic"). Bisonoric garmons are, e.g., Tula accordion (Russian: Тульская гармонь, after Tula) and talyanka (тальянка, "Italian")
The garmon is also known by the names garmoshka (Russian: гармошка) and garmonika (Russian: гармоника)".

I like the sound of garmon a lot; in fact, I consider it more of a test on someone's "russiness" (yey, I can make up words just like Sara Palin and Stephen Colbert's writers) than love for vodka or banya.


I'm lazy so here is some more info from Wiki that sound right about another russian instrument:
The bayan (Ukrainian and Russian: баян) is a type of chromatic button accordion developed in Russia in the early 20th century and named after 11th-century bard Boyan. The differences in internal construction give the bayan a different tone color from Western instruments, and the bass has a much fuller sound. Because of their range and purity of tone, bayans are often the instrument of choice for accordion virtuosi who perform classical and contemporary classical music.

Sounds good.
Long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I played Bayan for five years in school and I still like how it sounds. It's less folk and more classical. An example:



Of course, I wasn't nearly as good ;-) I just wanted to show both instruments.

Well, that's it for today.

Time magazine artticle

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2008890,00.html

What a steaming pile! I don't want to go after each  and every paragraph, but if you really don't like the country you're writing about, next time just write "Russia Sucks" and save everybody time to go through the usual crap. Or even better, look around the world and youmight realize that all the countries around the world act similarly when faced with danger of terrorism. Journalists (and politicians) are incredibly good at picking the facts that  fit in their model of thinking and are very dismissive about every fact that doesn't correspond to it, no matter how abundant it might be. This starts in early school and every year that goes by only confirms their belief that only Western civilisation is always right and the Russians ( Chinese, Arabs, Muslims, Indians - take your pick) are always wrong. I wish it was really that simple.

I guess, I have a rhethoric

question. A few days ago I saw an old white lady getting in her white minivan at a fancy-shmancy Walmart, very affluent neighbourhood. Minivan was covered by patriotic stickers and magnets like "Support our troops", eagles and flags of the US of A. As she drove off, in her back window I saw a bumper sticker plastered, just  like  this one:

Is there a contradiction here? How is it possible to blend someone's views in such a way?

Russian cursive writing

is mighty unusual and difficult to make sense for most foreigners who encounter it. We Russians grow up without paying much attention to the fact that the Russian language that lives in the books, magazines, blogs and other printed media is expressed using different (sometimes strikingly so) letters and symbols than when we pick a pen and actually write something down on a piece of paper. Effectively, we have two alphabets and we learn them in our first year in school. One is for reading and another is for writing. Here's an example: Phrase in cursive

Looks like this in print:
 
СЪЕШЬ ЖЕ ЕЩЁ
ЭТИХ МЯГКИХ
ФРАНЦУЗСКИХ БУЛОК
ДА ВЫПЕЙ ЧАЮ!

Quite a difference. And this is not even the most famous example of Russian cursive. Here's a beautiful and well known picture from the Russian blogosphere:

It looks like      Д Ы Ш И Ш Ь in print and it means (you're) breathing.

So, if you ever decide to learn Russian, stay away from handwriting! ;-)