History of Russia - История России

[Altair]

While Fomenko and Nosovsky include some sources, my impression is they also overlook some others like archaeological finds. They often use analysis of words.

Yes, and this analysis seems sometimes too far-fetched to me (like confirmation bias). For example (from the quote above):

Азиатский Татарский Хан -> АС+ТР+ХАН.

They basically take 2 consonants from the first 2 words and the last word (ХАН) and create an abbreviation АС+ТР+ХАН. I'm not an expert in linguistics but this linguistic transformation seems off to me.

They analyze ancient text, astronomic events and so on but the chronology shifts seem sometimes far-fetched as well. For example, they write in Христос. Русь и Рим (Christ. Rus' and Rome):

В 2003 году в итоге многолетних исследований нам удалось окончательно установить датировку евангельских событий: вторая половина XII века н. э. При этом оказалось, что подлинный год Рождества Христова это примерно 1152 год н. э., а подлинный год распятия и Воскресения Христа — 1185 год н. э.

In 2003, as a result of years of research, we were able to finally establish the dating of the Gospel events: the second half of the 12th century AD. It turned out that the true year of the birth of Christ is about 1152 AD. and the true year of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ - 1185 AD.

So basically using time shift of 1185 years! On the other hand, on their website they present a chronology map which uses 3 different chronological shifts: 330, 1050 and 1800 years. 330 years is closer to the chronological shift mentioned by C's:

(Pierre) Maybe you can ask this question. Caesar was born roughly 2,114 years ago according to our official calendars. In reality, how many years ago was Caesar born?

A: 1635. {Difference of 479 years}

 

[Altair]

After writing this post, Session 9 December 2017 where I linked to a Russian video with a map with locations in Northern Germany and also presents links to the history of ancient Russia, I found some videos in Russian, that put ancient Slavic/ancient Russian influences in Germany on the map in still more details

Here is a repost of the answer to your post in the thread Session 9 December 2017:

(Joe) The idea was that they're trying to create some kind of bioweapon that's genetically specific...

A: Yes

Q: (Joe) ...against Russians.

A: Yes

Q: (Mikey) Why not just get samples...

A: Unfortunately, since most Caucasians are related to Russian forebears, this is a dangerous and delusional undertaking.

Part of the delusion might be that many are unaware of past links between the West and East of Europe.

I recently finished Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich and here are some related quotes:

...the data show that the Yamnaya also made a major demographic impact—in fact, it is clear that the single most important source of ancestry across northern Europe today is the Yamnaya or groups closely related to them. This suggests that the Yamnaya expansion likely spread a major new group of languages throughout Europe. The ubiquity of Indo-European languages in Europe over the last few thousand years, and the fact that the Yamnaya-related migration was more recent than the farming one, makes it likely that at least some Indo-European languages in Europe, and perhaps all of them, were spread by the Yamnaya.

His key observation is that all extant branches of the Indo-European language family except for the most anciently diverging Anatolian ones that are now extinct (such as ancient Hittite) have an elaborate shared vocabulary for wagons, including words for axle, harness pole, and wheels. Anthony interpreted this sharing as evidence that all Indo-European languages spoken today, from India in the east to the Atlantic fringe in the west, descend from a language spoken by an ancient population that used wagons. This population could not have lived much earlier than about six thousand years ago, since we know from archaeological evidence that it was around then that wheels and wagons spread. This date rules out the Anatolian farming expansion into Europe between nine thousand and eight thousand years ago. The obvious candidate for dispersing most of today’s Indo-European languages is thus the Yamnaya, who depended on the technology of wagons and wheels that became widespread around five thousand years ago.

This suggests to me that the most likely location of the population that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because ancient DNA from people who lived there matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians.

These results reveal a remarkably parallel tale of the prehistories of two similarly sized subcontinents of Eurasia—Europe and India. In both regions, farmers migrating from the core region of the Near East after nine thousand years ago—in Europe from Anatolia, and in India from Iran—brought a transformative new technology, and interbred with the previously established hunter-gatherer populations to form new mixed groups between nine thousand and four thousand years ago. Both subcontinents were then also affected by a second later major migration with an origin in the steppe, in which Yamnaya pastoralists speaking an Indo-European language mixed with the previously established farming population they encountered along the way, in Europe forming the peoples associated with the Corded Ware culture, and in India eventually forming the ANI. These populations of mixed steppe and farmer ancestry then mixed with the previously established farmers of their respective regions, forming the gradients of mixture we see in both subcontinents today.

The period around five thousand years ago north of the Black and Caspian seas corresponds to the rise of the Yamnaya, who, as discussed in part II, took advantage of horses and wheels to exploit the resources of the open steppe for the first time. The genetic data show that the Yamnaya and their descendants were extraordinarily successful, largely displacing the farmers of northern Europe in the west and the hunter-gatherers of central Asia in the east.

Gimbutas argued that the arrival of the Yamnaya in Europe heralded a shift in the power relationships between the sexes. It coincided with the decline of “Old Europe,” which according to Gimbutas was a society with little evidence of violence, and in which females played a central social role as is apparent in the ubiquitous Venus figurines. In her reconstruction, “Old Europe” was replaced by a male-centered society, evident not only in the archaeology but also in the male-centered Greek, Norse, and Hindu mythologies of the Indo-European cultures plausibly spread by the Yamnaya.

...ancient DNA data have provided evidence that the Yamnaya were indeed a society in which power was concentrated among a small number of elite males. The Y chromosomes that the Yamnaya carried were nearly all of a few types, which shows that a limited number of males must have been extraordinarily successful in spreading their genes. In contrast, in their mitochondrial DNA, the Yamnaya had more diverse sequences.

The descendants of the Yamnaya or their close relatives spread their Y chromosomes into Europe and India, and the demographic impact of this expansion was profound, as the Y-chromosome types they carried were absent in Europe and India before the Bronze Age but are predominant in both places today.

...in our data around 90 percent of males who carry Yamnaya ancestry have a Y-chromosome type of steppe origin that was absent in Iberia prior to that time. It is clear that there were extraordinary hierarchies and imbalances in power at work in the expansions from the steppe.

From Wikipedia:

 

[Chu]

Interesting! I haven't read Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich yet, but the above is really close to what David Anthony writes about in The Horse, the Wheel and Language, which I thought was fascinating. In the book he expands his theory a lot more, and gives very good (IMO) explanations for why some languages spread out more than others, and not always because of war and domination, but also because some peoples wish to emulate what more successful communities have achieved, for example. The Wikipedia entry gives a pretty good synopsis:

Anthony gives a broad overview of the linguistic and archaeological evidence for the early origins and spread of the Indo-European languages, describing a revised version of Marija Gimbutas's Kurgan hypothesis. Anthony describes the development of local cultures at the northern Black Sea coast, from hunter-gatherers to herders, under the influence of the Balkan cultures, which introduced cattle, horses and bronze technology.

When the climate changed between 3500 and 3000 BCE, with the steppes becoming drier and cooler, those inventions led to a new way of life in which mobile herders moved into the steppes, developing a new kind of social organisation with patron-client and host-guest relationships. That new social organisation, with its related Indo-European languages, spread throughout Europe, Central Asia and South Asia because of its possibilities to include new members within its social structures.

Part One covers theoretical considerations on language and archaeology. It gives an introductory overview of Indo-European linguistics (ch. 1); investigates the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (ch. 2); the dating of Proto-Indo-European (ch. 3); the specific vocabulary for wool and wheels (ch. 4); the location of the Proto-Indo-European homeland (ch. 5); and the correlation of these linguistic discoveries with archaeological evidence and the role of elite recruitment in language shift (ch. 6).

Part Two covers the development of the Steppe cultures and the subsequent migrations out of the Pontic-Caspian region into Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia. The splitting of the major branches of Indo-European (except perhaps Greek) can be correlated with archaeological cultures, showing steppe influences in a way that makes sense chronologically and geographically in light of linguistic reconstructions. Anthony gives an introduction to Part Two (ch. 7); describes the interaction between Balkan farmers and herders and steppe foragers at the Dniestr River (in western Ukraine) and the introduction of cattle (ch. 8); the spread of cattle-herding during the Copper Age and the accompanying social division between high and low status (ch. 9); the domestication of the horse (ch. 10); the end of the Balkan cultures and the early migrations of Steppe people into the Danube Valley (ch. 11); the development of the steppe cultures during the Eneolithic, including the interaction with the Mesopotamian world after the collapse of the Balkan cultures and the role of Proto-Indo-European as a regional language (ch. 12); the Yamna culture as the culmination of these developments at the Pontic-Caspian steppes (ch. 13); the migration of Yamna people into the Danube Valley and the origins of the western Indo-European languages at the Danube Valley (Celtic, Italic), the Dniestr (Germanic) and the Dnieper (Baltic, Slavic) (ch. 14); migrations eastward which gave rise to the Sintashta culture and Proto-Indo-Iranian (ch. 15); migrations of the Indo-Aryans southward through the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological complex into Anatolia and India (ch. 16); and concluding thoughts (ch. 17).

Part One: Language and Archaeology
Chapter One: The promise and Politics of the Mother Language
Anthony introduces the similarities between a broad range of languages and their common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. He proposes that "the Proto-Indo-European homeland was located in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas in what is today southern Ukraine and Russia."[1] Anthony gives a short overview of the history of the linguistical study of PIE[2] and then presents six major problems that hinder a "broadly acceptable union between archaeological and linguistic evidence."[3]

Chapter Three: Language and Time 1. The Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European
Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, Don Ringe and Tandy Warnow propose the following evolutionary tree of Indo-European branches:[4]

• Pre-Anatolian (before 3500 BCE)
• Pre-Tocharian
• Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic (before 2500 BCE)
• [Pre-Germanic][note 1]
• Pre-Armenian and Pre-Greek (after 2500 BCE)
• [Pre-Germanic];[note 1] Proto-Germanic c. 500 BCE[6]
• Pre-Balto-Slavic;[4]
• Proto-Indo-Iranian (2000 BCE)

Chapter Four: Language and Time 2: Wool, Wheels and Proto-Indo-European
Anthony proposes that the Proto-Indo-European emerged after ca. 3500 BCE. He bases that especially on his analysis of Indo-European terms for wool textiles and wheeled vehicles:

Neither woven wool textiles nor wheeled vehicles existed before about 4000 BCE. It is possible that neither existed before about 3500 BCE. Yet Proto-Indo-European speakers spoke regularly about wheeled vehicles and some sort of wool textile. This vocabulary suggests that Proto-Indo-European was spoken after 4000–3500 BCE.[7]​

Chapter Six: The Archaeology of Language
Anthony, following the methodology of Ringe and Warnow, proposes the following sequence:[8]

• Pre-Anatolian (4200 BCE)
• Pre-Tocharian (3700 BCE)
• Pre-Germanic (3300 BCE)
• Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic (3000 BCE)
• Pre-Armenian (2800 BCE)
• Pre-Balto-Slavic (2800 BCE)
• Pre-Greek (2500 BCE)
• Proto-Indo-Iranian (2200 BCE), split between Iranian and Old Indic 1800 BCE

A key insight is that early expansions of the area in which Indo-European was spoken were often caused by "recruitment," rather than only by military invasions. With the Yamna culture as a nucleus candidate, the original recruitment would be to a way of life in which intensive use of horses allowed herd animals to be pastured in areas of the Ukrainian / South Russian steppe, outside of river valleys.

Part Two: The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes
Chapter Eight: First Farmers and Herders: The Pontic-Caspian Neolithic


Ukraine rivers

According to Anthony, the development of the Proto-Indo-European cultures started with the introduction of cattle at the Pontic-Caspian steppes,[9], which, until ca. 5200-5000 BCE, were populated by hunter-gatherers.[10] The first cattle herders arrived from the Danube Valley at ca. 5800-5700 BCE, descendants from the first European farmers.[11] They formed the Criş culture (5800-5300 BCE), creating a cultural frontier at the Prut-Dniestr watershed.[12]

The adjacent Bug-Dniester culture (6300–5500 BCE) was a local forager culture from which cattle breeding spread to the steppe peoples.[13] The Dniepr Rapids area was the next part of the Pontic-Caspian steppes to shift to cattle-herding. It was the most densely-populated area of the Pontic-Caspian steppes at the time and had been inhabited by various hunter-gatherer populations since the end of the Ice Age. From ca. 5800-5200, it was inhabited by the first phase of the Dnieper-Donets culture, a hunter-gatherer culture contemporaneous with the Bug-Dniestr culture.[14]

Chapter Nine: Cows, Copper and Chiefs
At ca. 5200-5000 BCE, the non-Indo-European Cucuteni-Tripolye culture (5200-3500 BCE) appears east of the Carpathian mountains, [15] moving the cultural frontier to the Southern Bug valley,[16] and the foragers at the Dniepr Rapids shifted to cattle herding, marking the shift to Dniepr-Donets II (5200/5000-4400-4200 BCE).[17] The Dniepr-Donets culture kept cattle not only for ritual sacrifices but also for their daily diet.[18] The Khvalynsk culture (4700-3800 BCE),[18] located at the middle Volga, which was connected with the Danube Valley by trade networks,[19] also had cattle and sheep, but they were "more important in ritual sacrifices than in the diet."[20] According to Anthony, "the set of cults that spread with the first domesticated animals was at the root of the Proto-Indo-European conception of the universe"[20] in which cattle had an essential role.[21] The Samara culture (early 5th millennium BCE),[note 2]

Chapter Ten: The Domestication of the Horse and the Origins of Riding: The Tale of the Teeth
The domestication of the horse had a wide-ranging effect on the steppe cultures, and Anthony has done fieldwork on it.[26] Bit wear is a sign of horse-riding, and the dating of horse teeth with signs of bit wear gives clues for the dating of the appearance of horse l-riding.[27] The presence of domesticated horses in the steppe cultures was an important clue for Marija Gimbutas's development of her Kurgan hypothesis.[28] According to Anthony, horseback riding may have appeared as early as 4200 BCE,[29] and horse artifacts show up in greater amounts after 3500 BCE.[29] Horseback riding greatly increased the mobility of herders, allowing for greater herds, but also led to increased warfare by the need for additional grazing land.[30]

Chapter Eleven: The End of Old Europe and the Rise of the Steppe
The Sredny Stog culture (4400-3300 BCE)[31] appears at the same location as the Dniepr-Donets culture but shows influences from people who came from the Volga River region.[32] The Sredni Stog culture was "the archaeological foundation for the Indo-European steppe pastoralists of Marija Gimbutas,"[33] and the period "was the critical era when innovative Proto-Indo-European dialects began to spread across the steppes."[33]

Around 4200-4100 BCE, a climate change occurred, causing colder winters.[34] Between 4200-3900 BCE, many tell settlements in the lower Danube Valley were burned and abandoned,[34] and the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture showed an increase in fortifications[35] and moved eastwards, towards the Dniepr.[36]

Steppe herders, archaic Proto-Indo-European-speakers, spread into the lower Danube valley in about 4200-4000 BCE, causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe.[37] According to Anthony, their languages "probably included archaic Proto-Indo-European dialects of the kind partly preserved later in Anatolian."[38] According to Anthony their descendants later moved into Anatolia at an unknown time, maybe as early as 3000 BCE.[39] According to Anthony, the herders, forming the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka complex,[note 3] probably were a chiefly elite from the Sredni Stog culture at the Dniepr Valley.[41]

Chapter Twelve: Seeds of Change on the Steppe Borders. Maikop Chiefs and Tripolye Towns
The collapse of Old Europe lead to a decrease in copper grave gifts in the North Pontic steppes. Between 3800 and 3300, substantial contact took place between the steppe cultures and Mesopotamia via the Maikop culture (3700-3000 BCE), in the northern Caucasus.[42] To the west, Tripolye pottery begins to resemble Sredni Stog pottery, showing a process of assimilation between the Tripolye culture and the steppe cultures and a gradual breakdown of the cultural border between the two.[43]

Between 3800 and 3300 BCE, five eneolithic steppe cultures can be discerned, and Proto-Indo-European dialects may have then served as a regional language.[44]

• Mikhaylovka culture (3600—3000 BCE), on the Black Sea coast between the Dniestr and the Dniepr.[45] Mikhailovka I people looked less like the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka people and may have intermarried more with Tripolye culture people or people from the Danube valley.[46] Mikhailovka II upper level (3300-3000 BCE) imported pottery from the Repin culture (see below) and is regarded as early western Yamna.[47] In the steppes northwest of the Black Sea l, the Mikhailovka culture was replaced by the Usatovo culture after 3300 BCE.[46] The Mikhailovka culture at the Crimea developed into the Kemi Oba culture.[46]
• Post-Mariupol culture (early phase 3800-3300 BCE, late phase 3300-2800 BCE):[48] around the Dnieper Rapids, near the Donets River.[49] According to Ina Potekhina, the people looked most like the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka people.[46]
• Late/Phase II Sredny Stog culture (Dniepr-Donets-Don), c. 4000–3500 BCE.[50]
• Repin culture (Don) and late Khvalynsk culture (lower Volga):[51] the Repin culture developedby contact with the late Maikop-Novosvobodyana culture (Lower Don),[52] which penetrated deeply into the Lower Volga steppe.[53] Anthony also believes that Repin was highly significant to the establishment of the Afanasevo culture in eastern Siberia, c. 3700–3300 BCE.[54]

Chapter Thirteen: Wagon Dwellers of the Steppes. The Speakers of Proto-Indo-European


Location of early Yamna culture

The Yamna horizon (3300-2500 BCE)[55] originated in the Don-Volga area,[56] where it was preceded[57] by the Middle Volga's Khvalynsk culture (4700-3800 BCE)[18] and the Don-based Repin culture (ca.3950-3300 BCE),[58] and late pottery from these two cultures can barely be distinguished from early Yamna pottery.[59] The Afanasevo culture, at the western Altai Mountains, at the far eastern end of the steppes, was an offshoot from the Repin culture.[60]

The Yamna horizon was an adaptation to a climate change between 3500 and 3000 BCE. The steppes became drier and cooler, herds needed to be moved frequently to feed them sufficiently, which was made possible by the use of wagons and horseback riding, leading to "a new, more mobile form of pastoralism."[61] It was accompanied by new social rules and institutions to regulate the local migrations in the steppes, creating a new social awareness of a distinct culture, and of "cultural Others," who did not participate in the new institutions.[55]

The early Yamnaya horizon spread quickly across the Pontic-Caspian steppes between ca. 3400 and 3200 BCE.[62] According to Anthony, "the spread of the Yamnaya horizon was the material expression of the spread of late Proto-Indo-European across the Pontic-Caspian steppes."[63] Anthony further notes that "the Yamnaya horizon is the visible archaeological expression of a social adjustment to high mobility - the invention of the political infrastructure to manage larger herds from mobile homes based in the steppes."[64]

The Yamna horizon is reflected in the disappearance of long-term settlements between the Don and the Ural and the brief periods of usage of kurgan cemeteries, which begin to appear deep into the steppes between the major river valleys.[65]

The eastern part (Volga-Ural-North Caucasian) of the Yamna horizon was more mobile than the western part (South Bug-lower Don), which was more farming-oriented.[66] The eastern part more male-oriented, and the western part was more female-inclusive.[67] The eastern part also had a higher number of males buried in kurgans, and its deities were male-oriented.[68]

Chapter Fourteen: The Western Indo-European Languages


Course of the Danube, in red

According to Anthony, Pre-Italic, Pre-Celtic and Pre-Germanic may have split off in the Danube Valley and the Dniestr-Dniepr from Proto-Indo-European.[69]

The Usatovo culture developed in southeastern Central Europe at around 3300–3200 BCE at the Dniestr.[70] Although closely related to the Tripolye culture, it is contemporary with the Yamna culture and resembles it in significant ways.[71] According to Anthony, it may have originated with "steppe clans related to the Yamnaya horizon who were able to impose a patron-client relationship on Tripolye farming villages."[72] According to Anthony, the Pre-Germanic dialects may have developed in the culture between the Dniestr (western Ukraine) and the Vistula (Poland) in c. 3100–2800 BCE, and spread with the Corded Ware culture.[73]




Approximate extent of the Corded Ware horizon with the adjacent 3rd-millennium cultures (Baden culture and Globular Amphora culture, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture)

Between 3100–2800/2600 BCE, when the Yamna horizon spread fast across the Pontic Steppe, a real folk migration of Proto-Indo-European-speakers from the Yamna-culture took place into the Danube Valley,[74] moving along Usatovo territory toward specific destinations, reaching as far as Hungary,[75] where as many as 3000 kurgans may have been raised.[76] Bell Beaker sites at Budapest, dated c. 2800–2600 BCE, may have aided in spreading Yamna dialects into Austria and southern Germany in the west, where Proto-Celtic may have developed.[77] Pre-Italic may have developed in Hungary,l and spread toward Italy via the Urnfield culture and Villanovan culture.[77] According to Anthony, Slavic and Baltic developed in the Middle Dniepr (Ukraine)[78] in c. 2800 BCE, spreading north from there.[79]

The Corded Ware culture in Middle Europe probably played an essential role in the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages in Europe during the Copper and Bronze Ages.[80] According to Anthony, the Corded ware horizon may have introduced Germanic, Baltic and Slavic into Northern Europe.[77]

Chapter Fifteen: Chariot Warriors of the Northern Steppes
The expansion eastwards of the Corded Ware culture, north of the steppe zone, led to the Sintashta culture, east of the Ural Mountains, which is considered to be the birthplace of the Indo-Iranians.[81] Anthony skips over the post-Yamna cultures in the steppe zone (Late Yamnaya, Catacomb (2800-2200 BCE), and Poltavka (2700-2100 BCE)) but gives an extensive treatment of the intermediate Middle Dniepr culture (3200-2300 BCE) and of the Corded Ware cultures in the forest zone (Fatyanova (3200-2300 BCE), Abashevo (2500-1900 BCE), and Balanovo (3200-2300 BCE).[82]

After ca. 2500 BCE, the Eurasian steppes became drier, peaking in ca. 2000 BCE, with the steppes southeast of the Ural mountains becoming even drier than the Middle Volga steppe.[83] In ca. 2100 BCE, Poltavka and Abashevo herders moved into the upper Tobol and Ural river valleys, close to marshes which were needed for the survival of their herds.[84] They build fortified stringholds, forming the Sintashta culture at the southern range of the Ural mountains.[85] Via the BMAC, they stood in contact with middle eastern cities like Ur, and the Sintashta settlements reveal an extensive copper producing industry, producing copper for the Middle Eastern market.[86] The Sintashta culture was shaped by warfare, which occurred in tandem with a growing long-distance trade.[87] Chariots were an important weapon in the Sintashta culture and spread from there to the Middle East.[88]

Anthony notes that "the details of the funeral sacrifices at Sintashta showed startling parallels with the sacrificial funeral rituals of the Rig Veda."[81]

Chapter Sixteen: The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes
Steppe cultures between 2200-1800 BCE are the Multi-cordoned ware culture (2200-1800 BCE)(Dniepr-Don-Volga), Filatovka culture, and Potapovka. In the forest zone are the Late Middle Dniepr and the Late Abashevo cultures. East of the Urals are the Sintashta and the Petrovka cultures. East of the Caspian Sea is the non-Indo-European Late Kelteminar culture.[89]

The Catacomb, Poltavka and Potapovka cultures were succeeded by the Srubna culture, and the Sintashta and Petrovka cultures were succeeded by the Andronovo culture.[90]

I think it makes a lot of sense, but I'm not a historian...

 

[Altair]

Coming back to our discussion about "Penitent Avian Lords" and their connection to Etruscans mentioned by C's:

Session 21 June 1997

Q: Change of subject: I am tracking the clues through the various languages and alphabets. I would like to know which of these alphabets, Runic, Greek, or Etruscan, preceded the others, and from which the others are derived?

A: Etruscan.

Q: Well, who were the Etruscans?

A: Templar carriers.

Q: What does that mean?

A: Seek and ye shall find.

Q: Well, how am I supposed to do that? I can't find anything else on the Etruscans!

A: No.

Q: What do you mean 'no?' You mean there is more out there on the Etruscans?

A: Yes.

Q: Okay. What are Templar carriers?

A: Penitent Avian Lords.

Q: What does that mean?

A: For your search. All is drawn from some more ancient form.

Session 16 August 1997

Q: Ark suggested that the Etruscans may have gotten their alphabet as a mirror image. Could it be that they lived on the 'other side' of the mirror?

A: Latter is closer.

I was reading Gods of Cataclysm by Hugh Fox and the following excerpt caught my attention:

I suspected that Quetzalcóatl, like Itzamna, was a deified figure traceable to the bringing of East Indian science and technology to the New World, and I found it very helpful in elucidating the nature of the Olmecs to read in Caso’s The Aztecs: People of the Sun that Quetzalcóatl “is the very essence of saintliness; his life of fasting and penitence, his priestly character, and his benevolence toward his children, mankind, are evident . . . but side by side with this aspect of saintliness we find also in Quetzalcóatl an aspect of sin;

The etymology of Quetzalcoatl:

The Nahuatl nouns compounded into the proper name "Quetzalcoatl" are: quetzalli, signifying principally "plumage", but also used to refer to the bird—resplendent quetzal—renowned for its colourful feathers, and cohuātl "snake". Some scholars have interpreted the name as having also a metaphorical meaning of "precious twin" since the word for plumage was also used metaphorically about precious things and cohuātl has an additional meaning of "twin".

And here are excerpts from the interpretation of the legend of Quetzalcoatl:

In his Promethean aspect Quetzalcoatl is involved in the creation of human beings and in inspiring them with intelligence. Before Naollin's roseate splendour had burst into full day and brought the present world to light, Quetzalcoatl had to descend into the realm of the dead, Mictlan, to secure the precious bones of man so that humans might again inhabit the earth. In Mictlan, the realm of the fleshless, he confronted Mictlantecuhtli and Mictlancihuatl, Lord and Lady of the Land of the Dead, the 'masks' or reflections of Ometeotl and Omecihuatl in the lowest sphere of duality, beyond which is unknowable darkness, just as there is the Unknown above Omeyocan, the highest heaven. When Quetzalcoatl demanded the bones, Mictlantecuhtli offered them on condition that Quetzalcoatl sound the conch-shell and circle the kingdom four times. Whilst this seemed to be a genuine challenge, the shell had no sounding-hole and was ever mute. Quetzalcoatl called upon the worms to pierce the shell, and bees entered through the hole and made it sound. Whilst appearing to yield possession of the bones, Mictlantecuhtli called upon the forces of the underworld to prevent Quetzalcoatl from fulfilling his charge. Mirroring this deception, Quetzalcoatl sent his double, nahualli, who is Xolotl, his twin and another aspect of himself, to inform the Lord of the Dead that the bones would be left in Mictlan. Even whilst this message was being delivered, Quetzalcoatl gathered the bones of Man and Woman and fled.

The forces of the underworld did not pursue Quetzalcoatl directly; they had prepared a trap. Quetzalcoatl fell into the trap and lost consciousness for a time. When he recovered, he found the bones damaged and in disarray. Crying out to his nahualli, he asked, "What shall I do now?" His twin gave the pre-ordained response: "Since things have turned out badly, let them turn out as they may." And Quetzalcoatl took the bones to the gods.

And as soon as he arrived, the woman called Quilaztli, who is Cihuacoatl, took them to grind and put them in a precious vessel of clay.
 Upon them Quetzalcoatl bled his member. The other gods and Quetzalcoatl himself did penance. 
And they said, "People have been born, O gods, the macehuales – those 'deserved' into life through penance." Because for our sake, the gods did penance!

Manuscript of 1558
[...]

In tlalticpac, the dream world which is earth, Quetzalcoatl is the divine king who, like Osiris, the second divine pharaoh of Egypt, brought civilization to humanity. As the divine ruler in Tollan, he taught all the arts and sciences, from cultivation of maize to metallurgy and from astrology to poetry, as well as the sacred tlilli tlapalli, red and black ink, that is, writing and, by extension, wisdom. During the golden age he dwelt in his invisible form, guiding and governing in a kingdom of innocent joy. Yet the forces of limitation, shadows in this realm of light, plotted Quetzalcoatl's downfall. Tezcatlipoca took a mirror and invited Quetzalcoatl to gaze into it. To his horror, he thereby gained a body, rather like Anthropos, and seeing himself reflected in the mirror of inchoate Nature, became one with it, according to the Hermetic tradition. In his confusion he allowed a mask and feathered head-dress to be made for him, so that people might look upon him without fear. Whilst he was disoriented, demons made pulque, a fermented drink from sap of the maguey, and gave it to Quetzalcoatl. Thus intoxicated, he took Quetzalpetatl, his feminine aspect from which he now felt alienated, and slept with her, falling afterwards into a stupor. As the archetype of humanity, his deeds brought pain and suffering to humanity – the pain of having a body, the suffering of loneliness, the disharmonies of striving, contention, fear and guilt, which pit person against person and turn the powers of human consciousness into instruments of selfishness and its inevitable offspring, conflict and greed.

In the morning Quetzalcoatl awoke filled with grief and remorse. As god, he knew the unavoidable problems of incarnation, but as king, he saw the massive failure of civilization. Between potentiality and actualization fell the dread shadow of self-induced ignorance. Within the architectonics of human life, the problems of creating man had been wholly reflected, and thus Quetzalcoatl's earthly work was completed. He resolved to leave his beautiful Tollan and set out with his closest devotees. He journeyed throughout his kingdom, leaving at different sites marks of his presence – a sacred footprint here, a raised stone there – and stripped himself of his arts and powers as he went so that these might remain with humanity in his absence. He ordered a stone casket to be made, and when it was finished he lay in it for four days so that his most precious secrets might be absorbed into it. When he was ready, he ordered the stone box sealed up to prevent theft or contamination of its contents. Only those who have redeemed Quetzalcoatl's wisdom through severe penance and self-sacrifice can hope to know the contents of that mystic sarcophagus now secreted in the human breast, in the place of purity where Quetzalcoatl was accustomed to bathing.

There at Tlillin Tlapallin, the place of burning, he built a huge pyre, mounted it and set it aflame. His ashes rose into the air and the rarest birds of the earth appeared. As the red flames lit up the celestial vault, Quetzalcoatl became again the Lord of the Dawn.

When the ashes had ceased to burn,

Quetzalcoatl's heart rose up.

They say it was raised to heaven
.
And entered there.

Wise men say it became

The morning star, appearing at dawn,

And they add that it was not seen

For four days after his death,

Whilst he had sojourned in the Kingdom of Death.

And in these four days, he gathered arrows,

And eight days later, he appeared again

As the great star.

Since then he has sat enthroned.

The heart of Quetzalcoatl became Venus, the morning star which promises first the dawn, then the rising sun itself.

So what does it all have to do with Etruscans?

Here is what Hugh Fox writes:

I moved on out of the Rig Veda into the later Vedic and heroic period of Indian literature. I felt that I had moved back through Chinese and Aryan Indian civilization to a protocultural level, a genesis, back to a people who were perhaps the foundation for Chavin, and I really felt I couldn’t move on to any other Amerindian cultures until I had “solved” the Chavin mystery. At this point, though, I didn’t realize that by solving Chavin I would solve the mysteries of the Olmecs and the Mayas on the Atlantic side of the Americas, because I had no idea that these same “Dasyus,” these same Dravidians, under different names and in different “thrusts” and “migrations” had not merely gone eastward through Burma to China, but also westward into the Mideast, the Mediterranean, to Spain, the British Isles, and (perhaps) across the Atlantic to the east coast of Meso-America.

[...]

The reference to the “serpent race” here is crucial, Naga is Sanskrit for “cobra,” the Nagas were the snake people, the cobra people, and as Gilbert Slater points out in The Dravidian Element in Indian Culture, “that cobra worship was dominant among the Dravidians in the Vedic period is shown by the term Naga gradually superseding the other names used in Sanskrit literature for the Dravidians.” The Naga kings in ancient times even called themselves Nagas, Cobras. The connection between ancient Indian snake kings and the ancient Mexican snake king Quetzalcóatl already began to form in my mind.

It was at this point that I discovered the Jesuit scholar H. Heras’ Studies in Proto-Indo-Mediterranean Culture, and the worldwide importance of the Nagas as cultural movers, innovators, creators became clear to me. Chavin had led me to an ancient race which, according to Heras, had moved across the globe in prehistoric times influencing and shaping cultures that in turn had later influenced the New World in a kind of two-stage, two-step influence pattern.

[...]

We are so far back that we are forced to conceive of the Dravidians at this time as a kind of proto-Indo-Mediterranean race, the essential, bottom stratum of Indo-Mediterranean culture, which is still in the process of acquiring its identity and creating its cultural forms.

This proto-Indo-Mediterranean race migrates out of India (the Indus Valley) westward across the Arabian Sea into the Persian Gulf where, at the end of the Gulf in the Mesopotamian area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, it establishes Sumer. This is one key proto-Indo-Mediterranean migration route.

[...]

The primitive Indians were preeminently seafarers. One tribe, the Minas, were actually called “fish.” Another, the Tirayars, were “the people of the sea.” They traded and colonized not merely in Mesopotamia and Egypt but also in Crete, mainland Greece, Italy and Spain to the west, and to the east in Burma, Sri Lanka, and China! They seem to have had a major cultural influence on the development of ancient Minoan culture, and Heras even goes as far as tracing the pre-Celtic inhabitants of France, Ireland, and England back to Iberian settlers who in turn can be traced back to these same primitive Indians. In other words, what we have here is an explosive, energetic, competitive, vigorous race expanding out from India in ancient times, touching, forming, stimulating vast cultural areas in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the Orient.

[...]

According to Heras Horus, the hawk-man god in Egyptian culture arrived in Egypt via a migration of the Naga-people from India. So the same kind of bird symbolism can appear in various places visited/ colonized by Nagas, including Minoan Crete, Druidic England, and Etruscan Italy, along with all the rest of the Naga symbolic repertory. I mention this to stress the fact that finding similar symbolic patterns among other cultures does not necessarily mean a direct link with the Americas, but an indirect link from a common source.

Can it be a possible connection? I'm still reading the book and trying to wrap my head around it.

 

[Altair]

Another possible link between Etruscans and Dravidians:

ETRUSCAN, A DRAVIDIAN TONGUE?

by Arysio Nunes dos Santos

Introduction

We have, some years ago, made the remarkable discovery – which we now prove in full detail – that Etruscan, the ancestral tongue of the ancient Romans, is indeed a member of the Dravidian family of languages. The importance of this discovery cannot be overstated, as it radically alters all that is known of human prehistory. Among other things, it shows that the mobility of early man was far larger than allowed by the conventional academic doctrines of historiography and archaeology.

Secondly, the present discovery demonstrates the great importance that coy India had in civilizing the other nations, not only in the Far East, but also in the Mediterranean region, the so-called Old World. Dravida, even today one of India’s main tongues, is also closely related to the Austronesian languages, spoken all over the South Seas, from Madagascar in the West to Easter Island in the East. So, in a very literal way, we can say that Dravida – the name given the family – is indeed a global tongue that well deserves the name of Proto-World, the tongue formerly spoken in the primordial center where humanity first evolved, before its great diaspora.
[...]

Identification

In order to render the identification of the individual Dravidian roots and words we followed the genial numbering scheme devised by Burrows and Emeneau (BE) in their magistral work which indeed sets new, seminal trends in Linguistics. Without it, our decipherment of the Etruscan affinity with Dravida would have been utterly impossible. All previous attempts probably failed because the specialists did not dispose of this recent masterwork, and hence could not do a relatively thorough job, such as we pressure to have done here for the first time ever.

In fact, if our thesis succeeds, the largest share of the glory rightfully belongs to them and their Etruscological peers, rather than to our humble person. It is only because BE grouped the individual languages under collective entries for each base and each etymon that the global pattern for the family became apparent. Otherwise, anyone would be lost in the maze of tongues (about two dozen) and etyma, which present an enormous variety of subtle changes in both spelling (alphabets inclusive), as well as in form and etymology.

With this device – their device – all the reader has to do is to note the entry number in our paper and look for it in their dictionary, and then confirm, if he/she so desires, the root we gave and the presence of the corresponding etyma inside the group. Even if a particular etymology does not exist for a specific language within the group, this does not matter, as we explained further above, since it is attested elsewhere within the base.

No better proof of the existence of a particular transition, either phonetic or etymological, can be given than the fact that the evolution actually occurred in practice. Besides, in this way, they will be able to check directly the presence or not of the cerebrals whose marking we skipped in the present document, for the notational reasons expounded above.

Despite its apparent simplicity, the method we used is, however, actually extremely reliable, verifiable, testable and, hence, strictly scientific. Moreover, it has the advantage of filling up the enormous gaps that still exist – in the present state of the affair – in our knowledge both of Etruscan and of Dravida. The work of BE on Dravida has barely started, compared to, say, Sanskrit and the other languages both of India and elsewhere. We hope that the present discovery of its former importance for the origins of Western Civilization results in a greater interest in this charming and fantastically well endowed family of languages.

But the fact that the importance of Dravida today is relatively lesser, and that most tongues are now only spoken by primitives lost in the jungles of South India – savages who only welcome the inquisitive strange when they could cook him for dinner until recently – does not mean that they were also so in the far past.

Times change, and civilizations rise and fall, and often leave no traces of their former grandeur. Some once mighty civilizations go and leave almost no vestige at all, until the archaeologists and the linguists get to work on them. Such was the case of Egypt, Crete, Troy, Sumer and, even more surprisingly, of the fabulous Indus Valley Civilization, the realm of the very Dravidas we are mooting here in this context for the first time ever, we believe.

So, if our discovery indeed proves to be real, we have finally a direct evidence that the fantastic Indus Valley Civilization once extended not only over most of India and the Far East itself, but also all the way to the Mediterranean, where it was later reborn as the mighty Roman Empire itself, the brainchild of Etruria and its magnificent civilization.

We also hope that the present discovery of the Dravidian presence and role in prehistoric Europe – a fact thus far ignored by all – contributes to restore the former glory and dignity of that great people, the true enlighteners of the Occident, and serves to show that rather than enemies, Aryans and Dravidas actually shared the role of civilizers both in the East and in the West. So, the raging Aryan Invasion controversy finds its serendipitous end in the inescapable realization that both nations were one and the same originally, and only parted company rather late in time, well within historically documented times.

[...]

The article itself is pretty big (here is the 2nd part) and targets mainly linguists though it's still very interesting to read.

There is also an article Etruscan and Dravidian by Sten Konow published in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Freely available is only a small extract:

The remarks which follow are based on notes which I have made in reading Professor Torp's Etruskische Beiträge, vols. i–ii (Leipzig, 1902–3). I have never myself studied the Etruscan language, and my knowledge of Dravidian is rather limited. I was, however, at once struck by the apparent analogy of several features in both families, and I have thought it worth while to arrange my notes and make a short abstract of them. I do not think that I have solved the vexed question about the origin of the old inhabitants of Etruria. But I hope to have shown that there are many interesting points in which their language follows the same principles as that of the Draviḍas, and that I have, in so doing, added something to the probability of the theory that the old Etrurians did not belong to the Indo-European stock.

 

[Altair]

Q: Change of subject: I am tracking the clues through the various languages and alphabets. I would like to know which of these alphabets, Runic, Greek, or Etruscan, preceded the others, and from which the others are derived?

A: Etruscan.

Q: Well, who were the Etruscans?

A: Templar carriers.

Q: What does that mean?

A: Seek and ye shall find.

Q: Well, how am I supposed to do that? I can't find anything else on the Etruscans!

A: No.

Q: What do you mean 'no?' You mean there is more out there on the Etruscans?

A: Yes.

Q: Okay. What are Templar carriers?

A: Penitent Avian Lords.

Q: What does that mean?

A: For your search. All is drawn from some more ancient form.

Recently I came across the idea that Etruscans were believed by some ancient authors to be descendants of Pelasgians.

Pelasgians​

An ancient etymology based on mere similarity of sounds linked pelasgos to pelargos ("stork") and postulates that the Pelasgians were migrants like storks, possibly from Egypt, where they nest. [Strabo. Geography, 5.2.4.] Aristophanes deals effectively with this etymology in his comedy The Birds. One of the laws of "the storks" in the satirical cloud-cuckoo-land, playing upon the Athenian belief that they were originally Pelasgians, is that grown-up storks must support their parents by migrating elsewhere and conducting warfare. [Aristophanes. The Birds, 1355ff.]

According to Fragment 76 of Hellanicus's Phoronis, from Pelasgus and his wife Menippe came a line of kings: Phrastōr, Amyntōr, Teutamides and Nasas (kings of Pelasgiotis in Thessaly).[34] The Pelasgians under Nasas "rose up" (anestēsan) against the Hellenes (who presumably had acquired Thessaly) and departed for Italy where they first took Cortona and then founded Tyrrhenia. The conclusion is that Hellanicus believed the Pelasgians of Thessaly (and indirectly of Peloponnesus) to have been the ancestors of the Etruscans.

Hellanicus of Lesbos

His work includes the first mention of the legendary founding of Rome by the Trojans; he writes that the city was founded by Aeneas when accompanying Odysseus on his travels through Latium.[7] He also supported the idea that an incoming group of Pelasgians lay behind the origins of the Etruscans. The latter idea, from Phoronis, influenced Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who cites him [I.28] as a source.

Strabo. Geography, 5.2.4.:

” Likewise Æschylus in his Suppliants, or Danaids, makes their race to be of Argos near Mycenæ. Ephorus likewise says that Peloponnesus was named Pelasgia; and Euripides, in the Archelaus, says, “‘Danaus, who was the father of fifty daughters, having arrived in Argos inhabited6 the city of Inachus, and made a law that those who had before borne the name of Pelasgiotæ throughout Greece should be called Danai.’” Anticlides says, that they first colonized about Lemnos and Imbros, and that some of their number passed into Italy with Tyrrhenus, the son of Atys. And the writers on the Athenian Antiquities,7 relate of the Pelasgi, that some of them came to Athens, where, on account of their wanderings, and their settling like birds in any place where they chanced to come, they were called by the Athenians Pelargi [or Storks].

The Birds (play)​

The plot of the play revolves around Pisthetaerus, an Athenian who convinces the birds to create a great city in the sky, and thus regain their status as the original gods. Pisthetaerus eventually transforms into a bird-like god himself, and replaces Zeus as the king of the gods.

Aristophanes. The Birds:

LEADER OF THE CHORUS
Return to your ranks and lay down your courage beside your wrath as the hoplites do. Then let us ask these men who they are, whence they come, and with what intent. Here, Epops, answer me.

EPOPS
Are you calling me? What do you want of me?

LEADER OF THE CHORUS
Who are they? From what country?

EPOPS
Strangers, who have come from Greece, the land of the wise.

LEADER OF THE CHORUS
And what fate has led them hither to the land of the birds?

Plutarch about Pelasgians founding Rome (Romulus 1.1):

From whom, and for what reason the great name of Rome, so famous among mankind, was given to that city, writers are not agreed. Some say that the Pelasgians, after wandering over most of the habitable earth and subduing most of mankind, settled down on that site, and that from their strength in war they called their city Rome.

Can it be the "avian" connection?

 

[thorbiorn]

On 1tv.ru I found Monday evening a film about the history of the Century of the USSR, including highlights from some of the former republics. Here is a screenshot, in case you wish to look for it.

In the film, there are clips that show the results the USSR achieved and comments or contrasts these with the situations in the West. A comments hit closer to the last 10 years, since the republics are followed briefly also after the collapse of the USSR.

I enjoyed the images from the former central Asian republics. In the section about Tadjikistan, they claim this was where Zarathustra came from or lived.

Elsewhere, I found only the memory is left:
Why do the Zoroastrians of Tajikistan hide their religious affiliation?
Still, in an article by the president of Tadjikistan from 2009, he says:

My thoughts go back to Zarathustra, who created the immortal Avesta, he was the first prophet of the Tajiks.

Another article wrote:

Zoroastrianism in Tajikistan
From the book by B. G. Gafurov “Tajiks. Ancient, Ancient and Medieval history”
It has already been pointed out above that "Avesta" is a complex alloy of heterogeneous and non-simultaneous elements. For a long time, researchers have been working to dissect these elements and identify the oldest layers of the Iranians ' religion, and these studies have especially advanced over the past two decades. I. Gershevich proposed three names instead of one general name "Zoroastrianism": "Zarathustrianism" (the religion of the time of Zarathustra himself, as it is reflected in the "Ghats"); "Zarathustricism" (the religion of the time of Zarathustra himself, as it is reflected in the "Ghats"); later Avestan texts); "Zoroastrianism "(a religious doctrine of the Sasanian period).

 

[thorbiorn]

One aspect of Russian history, is that of the so-called Old Believers, and since most of the links and videos are in Russian, often without subtitles, I will post notes in this section of the Forum.

To be clear, the Old Believer have since the late 17th century always been a small minority, if not even tiny, but it does not mean, I think, that the story and history is not of some value.

First a little from the Wikis:
Old Believers or Old Ritualists (En Wiki)

Old Believers, also called Old Ritualists,[a] are Eastern Orthodox Christians who maintain the liturgical and ritual practices of the Russian Orthodox Church as they were before the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666. Resisting the accommodation of Russian piety to the contemporary forms of Greek Orthodox worship, these Christians were anathematized, together with their ritual, in a Synod of 1666–67, producing a schism (raskol in Russian) in Eastern Europe between the Old Believers and those who followed the state church in its condemnation of the Old Rite.

Старообрядчество (Ru Wiki)

Старообря́дчество (до указа о веротерпимости 1905 года — раско́л, раско́льничество); Древлеправосла́вие (по́зднее самоназвание ряда течений) — совокупность религиозных течений и организаций в русле русской православной традиции, отвергающих предпринятую в 1653—1660-х годах московским патриархом Никоном и царём Алексеем Михайловичем церковную реформу, целью которой провозглашалась унификация богослужебного чина Русской церкви с Греческой церковью и, прежде всего, с Константинопольской церковью («книжная справа»).

Богослужебная реформа была одобрена и подтверждена постановлениями ряда соборов, проходивших в Москве в 1653—1680-х годах. Противники реформы были преданы анафеме как еретики на Московском соборе 1656 года (только держащиеся двуперстного крестного знамения) и на Большом Московском соборе 1666—1667 годов. Реформа вызвала раскол в Русской церкви. В результате появились оппозиционные группы раскольников, впоследствии разделившиеся на многочисленные согласия<a.

В XX веке позиция Русской православной церкви по старообрядческому вопросу значительно смягчилась, что привело к определению поместного собора 1971 года, в частности, «утвердить постановление Патриаршего Священного синода от 23 (10) апреля 1929 года об упразднении клятв Московского собора 1656 года и Большого Московского собора 1667 года», наложенных ими на старые русские обряды и на придерживающихся их православных христиан и считать эти клятвы «яко не бывшие».

Beginning with connecting the past to the present, in this first post, there are links to SOTT articles, with some comments, where helpful.

The Old Believers of Russia as mentioned in older SOTT articles

Russian hermit in Siberian forest only surviving family member of an Orthodox denomination of 'Old Believers' (Sep 2014) This is about Babushka Agafia, (Ru: Бабушка Агафья) See also:
For 40 years, this Russian family was cut off from all human contact, unaware of World War II (Jan 2013)

Old believers mentioned in the summary or text of SOTT articles
Pope ready to act as mediator in religious dispute in Ukraine, meanwhile Kiev's Nazi-aligned forces storm remaining Orthodox churches (Mar 2023) where one finds:

Pope Francis is ready to act as an intermediary in negotiations between the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) and the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in the situation involving the eviction UOC monks from the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra monastery, Leonid Sevastyanov, the chairman of the World Union of Old Believers, told TASS on Tuesday, while speaking about the details of his personal conversation with the pontiff.

The World Union o Old Believers, appears as if having been created for the occasion, or even after.​

See International Old Believer Union was established in Moscow which has:​

3 May 2023 |​

The general meeting of the founders of the Association of Old Believer Organizations “International Old Believer Union” was held at Rogozhskoye in Moscow. Representatives of various Old Believer concords took part in it. Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church Korniliy was also present at the meeting. The subject of discussion was the charter of the organization. It was prepared in advance. The meeting participants made additional amendments to it and decided to establish the Association.​

For context, about the Kiev-Prchersk Lavra in Kiev, the Wiki has:​

The Kyiv Pechersk Lavra or Kyievo-Pecherska Lavra (Ukrainian: Києво-Печерська лавра), also known as the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves, is a historic lavra or large monastery of Eastern Christianity that gave its name to the Pecherskyi District where it is located in Kyiv.​

​

Since its foundation as the cave monastery in 1051, the Lavra has been a preeminent center of Eastern Christianity in Eastern Europe.​

The intervention of the Old Believers dit not work, as one can read in this article: Kiev mayor orders closure of Ukrainian Orthodox Churches citing 'ties to enemy nations'​

Russian Atlantis: The legend of the lost city of Kitezh (Jun 2016) where one finds:

Accounts of the ancient city of Kitezh are believed to trace back to the earliest days of Rus', however, the first written reference appeared in the Kitezh Chronicle, written by the Old Believers in the 1780s. (In Russian Orthodox church history, the Old Believers separated from the official Russian Orthodox Church after 1666 as a protest against church reforms.)

According to this Chronicle, the city of Lesser Kitezh was founded by Prince Georgy, Grand Prince of Vladimir in the early 13th century, on the banks of the Volga River in the Voskresensky District of the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast in central Russia. He then discovered a beautiful site further upstream, on the shores of Lake Svetloyar where he decided to build the city of Greater Kitezh. It was established as a monastic city and considered holy by all who inhabited it.

The end of the original article is not included in the SOTT reposting, so here it is:

Legends of the Invisible City
It is not clear exactly what happened to Kitezh, but legends and folklore have surrounded its mysterious disappearance for centuries. According to one popular tale, the entire city was submerged into the lake by the will of God, to protect its treasures getting into the hands of the Mongols. This has led to Lake Svetloyar sometimes being called the “Russian Atlantis”. Legend says that the army of the Golden Horde watched in dismay as the city sunk into the lake, the last thing they saw being the white glistening dome of the cathedral with a cross on top of it. The reality of the city’s disappearance may not have been so remarkable. Some archaeologists have suggested that the city may have suffered a landslide causing it to disappear into the lake.

In folk tales, the city of Kitezh is said to only be visible to those who are pure in their heart and soul. Believers in the legends often report hearing church bells coming from the lake or seeing lights or even the outlines of buildings beneath the water’s surface. In times past, pilgrims used to visit the lake in the hope of hearing the bells. They went there to pray and left alms for the city’s dwellers. It is also said that women visited the lake during World War Two to pray for their sons.

In Search of the Russian Atlantis
In 2011, the Vetluzhsky archaeological expedition set out to investigate what archaeological remains could be found around Lake Svetloyar. Excavations revealed traces of an ancient settlement, along with fragments of traditional Russian pottery. The scientific team plans to continue their explorations to see what else they may find from the ancient settlement. According to their assessment, the hill in which the remains were found was always prone to landslides, one of which may well have caused an ancient city to become submerged in the lake, giving rise to the fantastic legends of the invisible city of Kitezh.

Lake Svetloyar is located in the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, between Moscow and the city of Kazan
Is the city of Kitezh a product speculation, did it really sink, exist in another density, or perhaps in a different location? Why did the Old Believers come up with this story? Do some of the Old Believer groups have other "stories"?

Best of the Web: Managing Russia's dissolution: How disinformation works to divide and conquer (Apr 2019):

• Instigation of religious or intra-religious tensions, if the nation or ethnic group has a similar religion to that of its neighbors. [...]
  • [...]
  • Promotion of discords or sectarianism within the main religion of the nation. For example, for Orthodox Christianity: the Old Believers or Schismatic cults; for Islam: Sunni sects or Shia branches;
  • [...]

In a later post, there will be more about what helped to ferment the schism. Next:

Despite anti-Russian sanctions Mercedes is building 3 plants in Russia, and they're not the only ones (VIDEO) (Jan 2018)

Correspondent:

The village of Shuvoe in Yegoryevsky District. There's a legend that Old Believers were exiled from here. They left this place with noise and wailing.

One of the sources for the Wiki for Shuvoe/Шувое, is an Old Believer site which gives a different version of the name:​

The very name Shuvoye was born, according to folk beliefs, from two words: 'noise' and 'howl', since at that time the Guslitsky places were deaf, and the settlers heard only the noise of the forest and the howl of wolves... In fact, it arose, as it used to be, after the name of the Shuvoyka River (the particle 'ka' was most likely added later), near which a settlement arose.​

From the Ru Wiki, there is also:​

In 1852, two weaving factories were already operating in Shuvoye, in connection with which after the revolution the village was called Krasny Tkach.​

This is interesting, since the Old Believers in Moscow also in the 19th century set up weaving factories the.​

The Wiki about Shuvoe writes about the Old Believers, if translated:​

The village of Shuvoe is located on the outskirts of the historical region of Guslitsa, inhabited mainly by Old Believers, who have preserved their unique way of life and culture to this day.​

​

After the schism of the Russian Orthodox Church, which occurred in the second half of the 17th century, many adherents of the old faith, hiding from the authorities, found refuge in the forests of Shuvoy. [4] For two centuries, not far from the village of Shuvoye itself, there was a monastic settlement known as 'cells', where the locals brought food to their fellow believers. The settlement was founded by Old Believer monks who fled from Moscow. The 'cells' existed until the early 1930s, were repeatedly revived, being persecuted by the tsarist and then Soviet authorities. [4]​

​

In the village of Shuvoye there were three Old Believer churches, which belonged to the district, non-okruzhniki and Luzhkov concords. All of them were dedicated to the Holy Life-Giving Trinity and were destroyed by the end of the 1930s. In the village of Nareevo there was a separate district community with the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity, and it was also closed. In 1946, the Nareyevsky church was returned to the Old Believers and operates to this day[17].​

​

The self-consciousness of the inhabitants of Guslitsy, and the inhabitants of Shuvoye in particular, despite numerous administrative reshapings, was different even from the closest neighbors and was characterized by extreme originality.​

Next:

Best of the Web: Ridiculous! YouTube censors Christian videos because content describes and supports values of Russian Faith (Nov 2017) One of the videos taken down is about a group of Old Believers that came back to Russian from South America. Another was:

The story of a beautiful 500 year old monastery in the Russian far North (Solovki) - WATCH

The Solovetsky Islands is home to the Solovetsky Monastery, where the Solovetsky Uprising took place because the people did not want to submit to the church reforms:​

The Solovetsky Uprising, or Solovetsky Sitting, was an armed resistance of the inhabitants of the Transfiguration of the Saviour Solovetsky Monastery from 1668 to 1676 to the church reforms of Patriarch Nikon. Due to the refusal of the monastery to accept the innovations, the government in 1667 took strict measures, ordered the confiscation of all patrimonies and property of the monastery.​

That part of the story is not given much time, as it later became known as the place where the Russian Gulag system of the USSR was developed. Prison officers were sent there, and there was also a special area, a former church where prison experiments were carried out. In Solovetsky Monastery, there is:

After the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, the Soviet authorities closed down the monastery and incorporated many of the buildings into Solovki prison camp,[1] one of the earliest forced-labor camps of the gulag during the 1920s and 1930s.

Ancient history - The deja vu dodo (Jun 2017) the article discusses architecture and the source of the inspiration for the designs. Among the images, there are three Old Believer churches. Notice the octagon designs of the towers. The two churches to the left are older and probably date from the time Old Believers were persecuted in Russian in the late 17th century and had to hide in remote areas or leave.


Putin tapping into the worldwide revulsion and resistance to the hedonistic sewage coming out of the West (Apr 2014) The excerpt to make sense is long, but connects the present to the past. The sentence about the Old Believers has been bolded.

Indicting the "Bolsheviks" who gave away Crimea to Ukraine, Putin declared, "May God judge them."

What is going on here?

With Marxism-Leninism a dead faith, Putin is saying the new ideological struggle is between a debauched West led by the United States and a traditionalist world Russia would be proud to lead.

In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on God's side. The West is Gomorrah.

Western leaders who compare Putin's annexation of Crimea to Hitler's Anschluss with Austria, who dismiss him as a "KGB thug," who call him "the alleged thief, liar and murderer who rules Russia," as the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins did, believe Putin's claim to stand on higher moral ground is beyond blasphemous.

But Vladimir Putin knows exactly what he is doing, and his new claim has a venerable lineage. The ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers who exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, was, at the time of his death in 1964, writing a book on "The Third Rome."

The first Rome was the Holy City and seat of Christianity that fell to Odoacer and his barbarians in 476 A.D. The second Rome was Constantinople, Byzantium, (today's Istanbul), which fell to the Turks in 1453. The successor city to Byzantium, the Third Rome, the last Rome to the old believers, was - Moscow.

Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.

Putin is plugging into some of the modern world's most powerful currents.

Not only in his defiance of what much of the world sees as America's arrogant drive for global hegemony. Not only in his tribal defense of lost Russians left behind when the USSR disintegrated.

He is also tapping into the worldwide revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West.

In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia's flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity. His recent speeches carry echoes of John Paul II whose Evangelium Vitae in 1995 excoriated the West for its embrace of a "culture of death."

Alexander Dugin gave an interview about 20 years ago, where he speaks of the old believers.

He claims that the schism was helped along by a couple of people, Паисий Лигарид, Paisii Legar and Арсений Грек, Arseny the Greek, whom he accuses of being dubious people coming from the west and the Roman Pope.

Some of what Dugin says is along the lines for the following, from the Wiki about Paisii Legar.

According to the writings of the Old Believer church historian F. E. Melnikov, the activities of Ligaridus carried only hardships, obscurations of religion and the danger of joining the Catholic Church for the Russian church. In the' Brief History of the Old Orthodox (Old Believer) Church', Melnikov explicitly names Paisius Ligaridus as the main author of the judgments and conclusions of the Council of 1666-1667, and not the patriarch who had already been elected by that time[5]. Moreover, Ligarid, with reference to the' History of the Russian Church ' of Metropolitan Makarii, is called a Jesuit by Melnikov, an apostate from Orthodoxy, a thief, and even accused of sodomy[5].

The second one, Arseny the Greek had problems too, as is clear from the Russian Wiki, if translated:

No less mysterious than the merits and significance of Arsenius the Greek in the history of Russian enlightenment in the patriarchal period is his very personality, which on closer acquaintance seems unattractive. Arsenius was undoubtedly one of the most educated representatives of the Greek people of his time, but he was a man with extremely flexible convictions and conscience. Apart from the ease with which he changed his religious convictions, his servile obsequiousness to those in power and to the Solovetsky monks, apart from his inclination to false testimony in favor of himself and to the detriment of his neighbors, he did not think of going over to the side of the enemies of Patriarch Nikon when he lost power and could no longer show him mercy with his former generosity. It was not for nothing that the people, and mainly among the Old Believers and schismatics, formed an opinion about him that he was 'a sorcerer, a heretic, an astrologer, full of filth and the stench of the Jesuit heresies.' His activity in correcting the book of translations, as well as the trust shown by Nikon, aroused hatred for him in the Moscow clergy.

Interestingly, Patriarch Nikon met Arsenius the Greek at the Soloviki Monastery, mentioned earlier

In 1651, on Solovki, Arseny the Greek was noticed by Metropolitan Nikon of Novgorod, who took him first to Novgorod, and later, becoming patriarch, transferred him to Moscow.

In this article: New Roman sources on the "Busurmanism" of Arsenius the Greek (Russian), there are more details, as it has been determined what his real neame was.

There were of course people in Russia who understood the problems of having such a character close to power:

In 1654 Protopop Neronov wrote from imprisonment to the tsar about him: "... do not dare to translate the holy books by such a man. And now he, Arsenius, has been taken to Moscow and lives with Patriarch Nikon in his cell, and he makes him an enemy's witness, and he rejects the testimonies of the ancient great men and holy wonderworkers. Oh! Alas! Pious Tsar! Be kind and listen to the cries and prayers of your sovereign God-followers, and do not accept foreign monks, heresy-introducers, into the council".

Alexander Dugin says that Nikon himself was not such a bad person, but he was swayed to follow the wrong influences before he, supposedly, later in life came around to realize he had made a mistake, but by then it was to late to do anything about it. The Wiki about Nikon, does not mentions that there was such a realisation, but who knows?

Dugin claims the Old Believer have preserved a true Russian spirit, and that many of those who during the Communist rule inspite of repression continued their Orthodox belief, after the fall of the USSR turned to the Old Believer orientation, while the rank and file of former Communists, and Soviet Union's Pioneers began to frequent the ordinary Russian Orthodox Church.

To be continued later... It will probably be about the divisions within the Old Believers, how they organized their communities (rather interesting), and notes from a video about the importance of some of them for the development of Russia in the 19th century.

 

[Tuatha de Danaan]

To be clear, the Old Believer have since the late 17th century always been a small minority, if not even tiny, but it does not mean, I think, that the story and history is not of some value.

Thank you thorbiorn for a wonderful peer into the Old Believers. I imagine cold, desolate and places far from humanity the reason they have survived to this day. Those Jesuits sure do cause havoc where-ever they go and are still causing trouble in the Eternal City.

Looking forward to your continued future exposition on such an interesting subject.

Thanks again.

 

[thorbiorn]

To be continued later... It will probably be about the divisions within the Old Believers, how they organized their communities (rather interesting),[...]

Before getting to the divisions among the Old Believers, there is more about the Schism, and a few videos about the Old Believers. At the end after descriptions of the groups, there are notes about how the Old Believers lived following the Schism and at the end a painting of a scene related to the religious drama of the 17th century.

The Schism of the Russian Church
Schism of the Russian Church (Eng Wiki)
Раскол Русской церкви (Rus Wiki)
Skipping those details, there are other retellings found in:

Videos about the Schism
Schism. Old Believers of the USSR (1987) [Ru: Раскол. Старообрядцы СССР (1987)]
On one page, there is a short version embedded. Translated the title is: Old Believers. Best Film (USSR, 1989), about 35 minutes long, while the longer is 45:49 minutes. I checked and the longer version should be the more original. The comment to the shorter upload has when translated using Dee:

Best documentary film. USSR, 1989. In this film took part: Professor A. M. Panchenko, Fr. Ioann Mirolyubov, Metropolitan Olympius and many unknown, but surprisingly whole and noble in spirit Orthodox Christians (such nowadays one can hardly meet them). In general, a very high quality film. The atmosphere among the Old Believers is wonderfully conveyed, their outlook is shown. Very successful episodes with different people. And the authors of the film tried not to add anything from themselves. The voice-over unobtrusively and at the right moments makes a little wordy explanations. Everything is made in the best traditions of Soviet documentary. Today there are almost no such films. Old Believers must be seen - their strength, their conviction, their selfless night prayers, their courage and determination. To see how their national image and folk ethos have been preserved, to hear their preserved original Russian speech and to observe their faithfulness to the commandments of Christ. It amazes me how our contemporaries can remain so insensitive and ruthless towards the Old Believers. How could they not psychologically enter into this situation of helpless, defenceless millions (12 million out of the then - in the 17th century - small population of Russia), who suddenly have their customary centuries-old prayer books burned, icons cut down, burned together with living people, their right hands chopped off, tortured with iron - and all, it turns out, in order to make small formal amendments, and so maintain spiritual unity with the fallen Byzantium, which no one had ever even seen in the eyes of those. The Bolsheviks did the same, but in proportion to their goal: to completely destroy the Christian faith. And why did the Nikonians (ROC) need these methods? By using violence and executions to establish the faith, Nikon's associates put themselves outside of Christianity altogether. The Old Orthodox Christians, Old Believers believe as they were once taught at the baptism of Russia - and why are they schismatics? Suddenly they are told: their grandfathers, fathers, and you have believed wrongly up to now, we will change... Indifferent, self-serving people cannot bear anything, even if tomorrow you curse the opposite again. And those who have the truth pounding in them - that one didn't agree, that one was destroyed, that one fled to the forests. God, how could we trample the best part of our tribe? How could we tear down their chapels and pray and be in peace with God? Cut off their tongues and ears, imprison them in dungeons for life! And not admit their guilt until now?

The title of the documentary is also the title of a TV series that came out in 2011; see Раскол (2011), or the Ru Wiki. The series can be viewed on azbuka.ru, which is a site that has articles related to Russian Orthodox Religion in general, among them are some that discuss the Old Believers. Some seem not happy that the Old Believers did not trust the authorities of the time, and still have not mended their ways to fit the mainstream Russian Orthodox position. To me it seems that it was very much a revolution from above, and find it understandable that many would be reluctant.

Apart from the documentary and a fictional, though authentic representation, there are others:
Who are the Old Believers and how the church schism of the XVII century changed Russia / History Lessons / - MINAEV LIVE
2,936,814 views Apr 22, 2024
Кто такие старообрядцы и как церковный раскол XVII века изменил Русь / Уроки истории / - МИНАЕВ LIVE

The church schism of the 17th century is a major milestone in the history of Russia. The time when the confrontation between the part of Russia that is for Russian antiquity and the part that is for European modernization begins. Nikon's church reform provoked fierce resistance among the people, causing a split and bloody repression. Supporters of the old church rules - Old Believers and Old Believers-were sent into exile.

What is a church schism? Who are the Old Believers? Why did the split occur? What are the differences between the Old Believers and the New Believers adopted by Patriarch Nikon? How did Tsar Alexey Romanov feel about the reform of the Church? How did the church schism of the 17th century change Russia?

Below is the listed content:

Content: 00:00 What's the topic? 02:00 What is the "Schism"? 03:08 Russia after the Time of Troubles and Tsar Alexei Romanov
[...]
06:04 Modernization of the Army and Western Influence 09:51 The "Western Circle" under Tsar Alexei Romanov 12:55 The Russian Church in the early 17th century 19:15 Attitude towards science and art in Russia 20:21 Why was Russia against schools and education? 24:26 Why did the church need to be modernized? 25:55 Tsar Alexei Romanov and Patriarch Nikon 32:57 Church reform 35:16 different new rules from the old believers 38:42 Beginning of a split 40:09 the Attitude of the king to the events 42:07 Avvakum and the resistance movement 46:12 the Main problem of the split 48:19 Link Avvakum 52:03 Link of Patriarch Nikon 54:45 Riots believers across the country 55:45 Who's Boyarynya Morozova 58:20 Link Habakkuk in Pustozersk 01:00:23 In conclusion

This video has a transcript, and it has almost 6000 comments. Probably there is something to learn from reading some of the comments of this and also the following videos

Old Believers. A film about the history of the church schism. ‪@amamontov‬
Старообрядцы. Фильм об истории церковного раскола.
1,239,233 views Premiered Oct 11, 2020 МОСКВА

In the middle of the seventeenth century, an event took place in Russia, the echoes of which we feel to this day. There was a church schism. As a result, there was a division of the people into Old Believers and followers of the new style. Who started the church reform? Why were the Old Believers so cruelly persecuted? About it in the documentary film by Arkady Mamontov ‘Old Believers’.

The film is timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the fighter for the faith - the Old Believer Protopope Avvakum. Based on documents and facts, we will tell in detail about the history of the church schism. Filming took place in the cathedrals of the Moscow Kremlin, in the Historical Museum on Red Square, in the Russian Archive of Ancient Acts.

Our film crew visited the impenetrable Kerzhensky forests of the Nizhny Novgorod region, where more than 100 years ago there were Sketes of Old Believers who decided to find solitude with God and nature. And also in the native village of Protopope Avvakum Grigorovo and in Veldemanovo - the birthplace of Patriarch Nikon. In the Kirov region, after hundreds of years, the real patriarchal pre-reform Russia, untouched by world progress, has been preserved.

We recorded an interview with Metropolitan Korniliy, the ruler of the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church, and leading secular historians. And we wondered whether we, brothers in faith, will ever again pray together in love and harmony.

This video has more than 3600 comments.

OLD BELIEVERS. The Last oligarchs of the Empire | PHYBE
СТАРООБРЯДЦЫ. Последние олигархи империи | ФАЙБ
1,443,573 views May 3, 2024

Today we will talk about what connects the church schism and the rapprochement with Europe. Why the Old Believers opposed the Tsar and supported the Socialists. And most importantly, how such great people came out of such a closed and very conservative environment. Contents: 0: 00 What unites these people 01: 47 Disputes about the Third Rome 03: 33 The Church Canon in books 08: 33 How the community lived 12: 00 The birth of wealth 18: 05 Guchkovs 21: 37 Morozovs 29: 08 Ryabushinskys 33: 12 Tretyakov 36: 48 Politics and Business 41: 00 The end golden age 42: 28

This video has more than 2500 comments.

The main divisions of the Old Believers (Eng Wiki) Старообрядчество (Ru Wiki)​

There are two: Popovtsy and Bespopovstsy. Taking each group in turn there is:

Popovtsy (Ru Wiki, Eng Wiki). The literal meaning is "priested ones".

The Popovtsy represented the more moderate conservative opposition, who strove to continue religious and church life as it had existed before the reforms of Patriarch Nikon. They recognised ordained priests from the new style Russian Orthodox church who joined the Old Believers and who had denounced the Nikonian reforms. Popovtsy have priests, bishops and all sacraments, including the Eucharist.

In the late 18th - early 19th century their spiritual centre was located in Moscow at the Rogozhskoye cemetery

There are three directions within Popovtsy: the Belokrinitskaya Hierarchy, the Beglopopovsty or Novozybkovskaya hierarchy, and third, the Edinoverie.

Belokrinitskaya Hierarchy (Ru Wiki, Eng Wiki):

The Belokrinitskaya hierarchy was created in 1846 by acceptance of the Greek Metropolitan Ambrose. The hierarchy is called after the name of the see of the First Hierarch Belaya Krinitsa, Bukovina, in Austria-Hungary (currently Chernivtsi Oblast, Ukraine).

Major sponsorship for organizing this hierarchy (search for a metropolitan, organizing the necessary facilities, smuggling of candidates for priesthood etc. through the Russian border in both directions) came also from the Russian Old Believers merchant families, such as Ryabushinskie and Morozovy.

This group calls itself the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church (Eng Wiki)/ Ру́сская правосла́вная старообря́дческая це́рковь (Ru Wiki), abbreviated РПСЦ. The Official website, also has a short history of the other variations. In Romania, it is called the Lipovan Orthodox Old-Rite Church (Eng Wiki). The main church in Russia of this denomination is Pokrovsky Cathedral at the Rogozhsky cemetery (Ru Wiki). As an example of a minor church in Moscow that belongs to this group, see this page, which also explains what happened during Soviet times and how it came back to life.

Beglopopovsty; Novozybkovskaya hierarchy, "It is now known as the Russian Old-Orthodox Church." (Eng Wiki) or
Русская древлеправославная церковь (Ru Wiki), abbreviated РДЦ. Official website. The English Wiki explains the relation with the previous group:

This jurisdiction incorporated those Old Believer groups which refused to accept the authority of Belokrinitskaya Hierarchy, est. 1846 (see Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church). It was also known as Novozybkov Hierarchy (by the name of the city where its chief hierarch resided in 1963–2000). It is considered to be independent of the Eastern Orthodox Communion i.e. it is not recognised by the Patriarch of Constantinople, nor by any of the Orthodox churches in communion with the Patriarch.

Edinovertsy/Edinoverie (citing the Wiki on Popovtsy)

Around 1800, a group of Popovtsy, mainly merchants from Moscow seeking the abrogation of discriminating legislation which obstructed their commercial activities, offered to acknowledge the leadership of the Synod of the Russian Orthodox State Church, on condition that they would be allowed to use the old books and rites. They came to be known as Edinovertsy and are generally not regarded as Old Believers, but rather Old-Ritualists.

This group has its own churches. An example is the Church of St. Nicholas in Studenets (Map) or see this page. It turned out that Alexander Dugin is associated with the Edinoverie. Translating from Russian, after following the link in his Ru Wiki to the newspaper article gives:

"GLOBALISM IS THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW BABYLONIAN TOWER"
— So there's a chance to hear and change?

— Of course there is. As long as there is a human being, there is a chance. A human being is free until they are replaced by artificial intelligence. Until then, they have the opportunity to turn, change, and save themselves. However, at some point, there will be no one to make the decision, and it will not be an easy one. This does not mean that one should immediately run to the church. The church, like the mosque, is itself integrated into the process of modernization, and both priests and mullahs are affected by the spirit of Modernity.

— I think we only have a business church and a business mosque left.

"I wouldn't say that. I'm a fellow believer myself."

"You've always been an Old Believer."

— Yes, that's true. Unitarianism is an Old Believer movement. However, I would prefer not to discuss the church or the mosque in a critical manner. I am not a Muslim; I am a Christian.

So much for the "priested ones". Next:

Bespopovstsy (Ru Wiki, Eng Wiki The literal meaning is "priestless ones" known as the Priestless Old Believers
Translating some paragraphs from the Russian Wiki, which is better than the English, there is:

It arose at the end of the XVII century, after the death of priests of the "old" ordination, that is, installed in the Russian Church before the church reform of Patriarch Nikon (mid-XVII century), the need for the priesthood for the salvation of the soul is denied.

The area of origin of bespopovstvo was the Russian North-Veliky Novgorod and Pomorie.

Since the sacraments and the liturgy was performed by priests, the priestless ones dispensed with many of those while baptism, and for some, confession, ares performed by elected lay people. Regarding marriage, there are variations with some accepting this church sacrament and some not. The Ru Wiki has when translated:

Currently, marriage is recognized by representatives of the largest sect in Russia and the Baltic States, the Pomor sect.

... by the beginning of the XXI century, there were more than 200 communities in the Russian Federation[6].

The Wiki is Pomorian Old-Orthodox Church (Eng WikiI, Древлеправославная поморская церковь, abbreviated ДПЦ. It seems the website given on the Ru Wiki is outdated.

How the Old Believers lived in the years after the schism​

In the Old Believer community, education was important, since it was required for learning scripture and hymns. Being able to paint icons was also important. Not only reading and painting was important, being able to reproduce a readable handwriting was also important. In the Wiki Schism of the Russian Church (Eng Wiki), there is a remarkable point:

Since the Old Believers were denied the use of the printing press to print their literature and unrevised service books, they developed a robust tradition of manuscript writing and book collecting.

Will that be how books might get transmitted if the planet suffers a technological reversal of some kind? How long would it take any of us to make a readable hand written copies of say The Secret History of the World, The Wave, or From Paul to Mark? What kind of dedication and discipline would be needed to preserve knowledge for generations?

In the video OLD BELIEVERS. The Last oligarchs of the Empire | PHYBE mentioned above, there is a section, 7:31 Chapter two. How the community/congregation lived. Some notes from this chapter include:

When the first persecution finished some returned to cities to live with others. Some migrated to other countries or to remote places to have as little to do as possible with the state.

Example: Karelia the middle of the 17th century. You have little to do with the Government and is isolated from others which also helped to preserve the purity of their teachings. Fundamental values were: Chastity, Abstinence from alcohol, No cutting of the beard, No European clothing (Russia is part of Europe, one might say no modern fashion). This was the minimal set that was present in any congregation.

Because the old believers were surrounded with “heretics” the relation between members were closer than between mere neighbours. They were your brothers and sisters. People participated in each other’s sorrows and joys. There was in incredible amount of collectivism, and there was the principle, it is not my property but ours.

Returning to the example of a congregation in Karelia in the 17th century, instead of a priest, they have a “reader” (Ru: начётчик), an educated person who better than anyone else masters writing. He is chosen by other members of the congregation. And there would be some to choose from, since among the Old Believers all were taught to read and write. The Old Believers introduced democratic institutions in the community. They had a deep appreciation for equality and did not recognize authorities. Since there was no connection with other Old Believers except those that were closest, your practice could change much with time. A typical Karelian Old Believer group would be richer and cleaner than surrounding villages.

The people were hardworking and considered absence of work as the school of evil. Trading and lending/borrowing money was not frowned upon. With time wealth became associated with being a gift from God. On some Old Believer icons of Nilolay the Wonderworker, one encounters not only the signification of salvation from poverty, but also of gaining of wealth.

Max Weber wrote a book in 1905 where he reflected on why Protestantism got a hold in the rich and developed areas of Europe, where later Capitalism flowered. Weber came to the conclusion that it had to do with the world view of the Protestants, and he mentioned three key factors: a cult of work, a striving for knowledge, and an understanding of money not merely as a means for spending. Among the Old believers: Working hard is commendable. One must strive for knowledge. Money and wealth are not a shame, but values. And just that was also the same base for the culture of entrepreneurship that led to wealth in these countries. Not for nothing, the Old Believers are called Russian Protestants. Though the origins are completely different, the result were similar and the Old Believers began to get rich rapidly.

The golden age of the Russian Old Believers
This leads the video to the next section 12:00 Chapter three. The birth of wealth. In the introduction to the video, the speaker explains that at the end of the 19th century, and early 20th, the Old Believer groups administered about 30 % of the wealth of the Russian empire. The central part of the video is dedicated to the story of four of the most well known Old Believer merchant- and entrepreneur- families.

A panting of an episode from the Schism found in the Tretyakov Gallery ​

The work laid by one of these families, the Tretyakov family, is still celebrated today, as they were the founders of the famous Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. If you visit the gallery, you might encounter this painting, called Boyarina Morozova (1887), Ru: Боярыня Морозова 1887, by Vasily Surikov (1848-1916). Purchased by P. M. Tretyakov from the painter in 1887.

Translating the description of the painting found on the Tretyakov website, there is:

In Russian history, Surikov was attracted by turning points, dramatic events, extraordinary destinies, strong characters.

The tragic fate of the disgraced boyarina Morozova struck him as a child, when he first heard a story about her. Years had to pass for what was dormant in memory to be reinforced by the knowledge read in the books of historians, to be combined with the literary image of Morozova in the works of modern writers.

Theodosia Morozova belonged to the most noble Russian boyars. She was an ardent opponent of Nikon's reforms and a follower of Archpriest Avvakum, the spiritual head of the schismatic movement in Russia in the 17th century. Surikov depicted the moment when Morozova, chained, is carried through the streets of Moscow "to disgrace" in order to then imprison her in the Borovsk Monastery, where she would end her days.

Morozova's entire appearance expresses fanatical strength, readiness to go to any torment, but remain true to her idea. Echoing Morozova's two-fingered sign, a symbol of the old faith, the holy fool is reaching for a beggar's sleigh, a young noblewoman in a blue fur coat bows her beautiful head before the boyaryna, boys are running after the sleighs, indispensable witnesses of everything that happens on the streets of Moscow. They embody the living connection between the present and future times, preserving in memory the reality that becomes history for future generations. So Surikov, as a teenager, was more than once involved in the whirlwind of Siberian events, the impressions of which were woven into the canvas of his historical canvases.

The Moscow people of the XVII century in the diversity of clothes, conditions, ages and attitudes to Morozova fill the picture. This picturesque canvas shows the complete unity of deeply dramatic content and generous beauty of painting. Frosty air, sparkling blue snow, a rich variety of clothes, the domes of churches, the roofs of houses covered with snow merge into a harmonious picturesque sound, like the powerful polyphony of a choir or orchestra subordinate to the will of the conductor.

Before starting work on the painting, Surikov made a trip to Europe. Familiarity with classical and modern art meant a lot to the artist. He was particularly captivated by the Venetian Renaissance colorists. He adopted their pictorial principle: unity of tone with richness of color and its shades. Thanks to this, the artist perfectly conveyed the coloristic features of the Russian winter landscape, achieving an almost impressionistic effect in its image. The painting captures the beauty and color of ancient clothing, which is combined into a single decorative pattern, anticipating the artistic principles of the next generation of masters. But in the diversity of color, the characters of people are not lost. Surikov was particularly attracted to women's faces. At the end of the work on the canvas, the artist will embody in portraits his interest in the beauty of female types and characters, many of which could be included in the multi-voiced chorus of the picture.

The description of the painting ends:

Surikov had a rare gift of” insight "into the past and in his historical canvases was able to recreate the very" spirit” of past eras, to establish a mysterious connection between the present day and the past.

We may agree or disagree with the above statement, it may depend on the viewer, but either way, and in a wider context, the Schism of the Orthodox Church in the 17th century was a significant event in Russian history. Its effects extends into the present.

 

[thorbiorn]

Regarding Russian history, George Gurdjieff came from the Caucasus area in what at the time was a part of the Russian Empire. Though his book Belzebub's Tales to his Grandson is a mix of many styles, there is a comment about the development of Russia and Turkey:

“[...]there is no doubt but that exactly the same will be repeated with the beings of this Turkey as occurred to the beings of the large community Russia after they had also begun to imitate everything European.

“It may be noted, for example, that, indeed, in all the beings of that large community Russia, only one or two centuries ago when, before they had yet begun to imitate everything European, these two being-functions still obtained which are called ‘Martaadamlik’ and ‘Nammuslik’ or – as these being-feelings are still called – the ‘feeling-of-religiousness’ and the ‘feeling-of-patriarchality.’

“And it was just those same being-feelings which a couple of centuries ago made the beings of that large community famous among other beings of the whole of this planet in respect of their morality and the patriarchality of their family foundations.

“But when afterwards they began imitating everything European, both these being-feelings still remaining in them began gradually to atrophy in them, and now at the present time almost all the beings of that community have become, in the sense of religiousness and patriarchality, such . . . the notion of which our wise teacher Mullah Nassr Eddin expresses by the mere exclamation:

[38. Religion, p. 712]

“‘Eh! . . . get along with you . . .’

“In Russia, moreover, none of this began with the yashmak or the fez.

“No. These headdresses were not worn there.

“But it was begun there with the ‘beard’ of the beings of the male sex. For the three-brained beings of the male sex there, the ‘beard’ is the same as our tail is for us, which, as you already know, adds, to the beings of male sex among us, masculinity and activity.

“It is now the turn of these unfortunate Turks.

“Once they have proposed to change their fezzes for European ‘bowlers’ the rest will follow of itself.

“Of course, the psyche of these Turkish beings will also soon degenerate as it degenerated in the beings of the community of Russia.

“The difference between the Russian beings and the Turks is only in this, that for the Russians one being only, namely, their czar, was the cause for this transformation of their psyche, whereas for the beings of the community Turkey, several beings were its cause.

“And there were several, because these Turks recently changed their old many-centuried established state-organization for a new one, a certain special ‘republican’ form, and in place of one ruler as had obtained among them during their former state-organization there were several.

“If even this former state-organization of theirs was bad, yet to counterbalance this there was a single ruler who introduced innovations solely for his community, and, furthermore, all of them old patriarchal.

“And now in this community Turkey: of the chief leaders there are several, and each of them is a wiseacre who forces upon the unfortunate ordinary beings of the whole of this community his callowness not responding at all either to the already long ago crystallized needs of the psyche of the beings of this community, or to their established pillars of their being-morality.

[38. Religion, p. 713]

“It is very interesting to notice further that just as formerly the Russian czar was supplied by his nearest old patriarchal functionaries with a great quantity of what is called ‘money,’ obtained by the sweat of the peasants, and was sent to the continent of Europe to study in the various communities there a great number of methods of government, in order that when he returned he might the better orientate himself in the ruling of his community; so likewise these present callow Turkish rulers were also provided by their own ‘patriarchal’ fathers with much ‘money,’ this time however obtained by the sweat of the ‘Khaivansanansaks,’ and also sent to the continent Europe to receive there what they call a ‘good education’ for the future welfare of their fatherland.

“And so, my boy, in both of these cases, because their future rulers of the two large many-millioned communities went to the continent of Europe quite young and had not yet at all become aware of their responsibility, but chiefly thanks to this that they were provided with money from the said source, the existence of the beings there on the continent of Europe was absorbed and permanently crystallized in them as so ‘splendiferous and beneficial’ that when afterwards, on account of the abnormally established conditions of existence in their country, they became leaders of these many-millioned communities, they, like the Russian Czar, could not help aiming to make the existence of their compatriots, to their bobtailed notions, happy as well.

[38. Religion, p. 714]

In reality, it was more complex also regarding the shaving of the beard. The first to work for this was the Zarina Agafya Grushetskaya wife of Feodor III of Russia:

She was the first to advocate beard-shaving and the adoption of Western clothes at the Russian court. She herself was the first tsarina to expose her hair and to wear a Western (Polish) dress.

The father of Feodor III was Alexis of Russia, the one who based on the work of some of the priests and missionaries introduced changes to the Russian Orthodox Church and made the former customs illegal thus creating the schism.

Here is what the Wiki says about Zar Peter the Great who followed a few years after the passing of Feodor III.

Peter led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political systems with ones that were modern, scientific, Westernized, and based on radical Enlightenment.

Gurdiejff is thus justified in giving the credit to the Zar for the adoption of European values, though the Russian Zar probably could not have pulled if off it there had not been a significant support among powerful people within Russia.

To learn more about what the values that Gurdjieff mentions, they might have been reflected, at least in part, by the content of a book, Domostroy (Wiki) distributed as advice for the merchants and wealthy about how to run their households. For an internet version, see this page on Azbyka.ru. It begins if translated:

1. FATHER'S TEACHING TO HIS SON
I bless you, a sinner, and teach, and instruct, and admonish my only son, and his wife, and their children, and their household, to follow the Christian laws, to live with a clear conscience and in truth, keeping the will of God and his commandments in faith, and affirming myself. in the fear of God and in a righteous life, instructing his wife and his household not by compulsion, not by beating, not by hard work, but like children who are always at peace, clothed and fed, and in a warm house, and always in order. I give you, who live as Christians, this writing as a memory, to instruct you and your children. If you do not accept my writing, do not follow my instructions, do not live according to it, and do not act as it says, you will answer for yourselves on the Day of Judgment, and I will not be responsible for your crimes and sins. I have blessed you to live a good life, and I have thought, prayed, taught, and written to you. If you accept my simple teaching and insignificant instructions with all your heartfelt purity, and if you read them, asking God for help and wisdom as much as possible, and if God will instruct you, and you will put them all into practice, and you will have the mercy of God and the Most Holy Theotokos, and the great miracle workers, and our blessing from now until the end of the age. And your house, and your children, and your estate, and your wealth, which God has sent you with our blessing and for your labors, will be blessed and filled with all good things forever and ever. Amen.

 

[thorbiorn]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) wrote a book The Red Wheel (Russian: Красное колесо, Krasnoye koleso) which "is a cycle of novels [...] retelling and exploring the passing of Imperial Russia and the birth-pangs of the Soviet Union." The Wiki says he conceived the idea for the novel in 1938, at that time he was just 20 years old. He gathered material for the first volume as he fought with the Red Army on the Eastern front, but did not begin writing until 1970.

The English Wiki gives the different sections:

The cycle currently has appeared as:

• August 1914, 1971, expanded 1984
• November 1916, 2 volumes, 1985
• March 1917, 4 volumes, 1989, 2017
• April 1917, ca 1991 (English translation forthcoming November 2025

Though the Russian revolution is often associated with the October Revolution. (25th October 1917, according to the Old Style, Julian Calendar, which was 7th November in the New Style Gregorian Calendar), before that there was the February Revolution, which began on 23rd February 1917 (Old Style) or 8th March in (New Style) and led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on the second of March (O.S.) or the 15th of March (N.S.).

The publisher of an English translation of March 1917 writes:

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the University of Notre Dame Press is proud to publish Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic work March 1917, Node III, Book 1, of The Red Wheel.

The Red Wheel is Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus about the Russian Revolution. Solzhenitsyn tells this story in the form of a meticulously researched historical novel, supplemented by newspaper headlines of the day, fragments of street action, cinematic screenplay, and historical overview. The first two nodes―August 1914 and November 1916―focus on Russia’s crises and recovery, on revolutionary terrorism and its suppression, on the missed opportunity of Pyotr Stolypin’s reforms, and how the surge of patriotism in August 1914 soured as Russia bled in World War I.

March 1917―the third node―tells the story of the Russian Revolution itself, during which not only does the Imperial government melt in the face of the mob, but the leaders of the opposition prove utterly incapable of controlling the course of events. The action of Book 1 (of four) of March 1917 is set during March 8–12. The absorbing narrative tells the stories of more than fifty characters during the days when the Russian Empire begins to crumble. Bread riots in the capital, Petrograd, go unchecked at first, and the police are beaten and killed by mobs. Efforts to put down the violence using the army trigger a mutiny in the numerous reserve regiments housed in the city, who kill their officers and rampage. The anti-Tsarist bourgeois opposition, horrified by the violence, scrambles to declare that it is provisionally taking power, while socialists immediately create a Soviet alternative to undermine it. Meanwhile, Emperor Nikolai II is away at military headquarters and his wife Aleksandra is isolated outside Petrograd, caring for their sick children. Suddenly, the viability of the Russian state itself is called into question.

The Red Wheel has been compared to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for each work aims to narrate the story of an era in a way that elevates its universal significance. In much the same way as Homer’s Iliad became the representative account of the Greek world and therefore the basis for Greek civilization, these historical epics perform a parallel role for our modern world.

While the novels have elements of fiction in a historical authentic setting, an article by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, related to the series about March 1917, was published in the Russian media RG.ru 16.02.2017 00:00 as Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'Reflections on the February Revolution'. which is the translated Russian title of Александр Солженицын: "Размышления над Февральской революцией" It can be found as a PDF here: https://cdnstatic.rg.ru/uploads/attachments/fascicle/3/35/87/33587-1486154591.pdf which is the digital version of the special issue from RG.ru, mentioned below. A videoed reading of the text, and with different readers, is available in this YouTube.
The same media also published an article about the background for the writing of the novels and also publishing Reflections on the February Revolution:

16.02.2017 00:23

How Solzhenitsyn's 'Reflections on the February Revolution' appeared​

Elena Novoselova

On February 16, subscribers to Rossiyskaya Gazeta will receive a special issue of the magazine Rodina with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's article "Reflections on the February Revolution." The lessons of February, when Russian statehood was destroyed within a few days, and with it the empire ceased to exist, are still relevant.

But few people know that 'Reflections...' are chapters of 'The Red Wheel'. And it was not easy for Natalia Dmitrievna Solzhenitsyna to convince her husband to pull them out of the novel and publish them separately.

Solzhenitsyn was obsessed with the theme of February since his youth. He told his future wife about his dream of writing about the Russian Revolution on the first day of their acquaintance. He began to write an epic in the second year of university. In emigration, he spent several months in the archives of the famous Hoover Tower at Stanford University, where a lot of priceless documents were stored, taken by Herbert Hoover from Russia burning with revolutionary events. For sixteen hours every day I read, made extracts...

The Solzhenitsyns turned out to be the owners of a unique collection of microfilms of Russian and Soviet newspapers. Immediately after being expelled from the USSR, the emigrants of the first wave sent them almost everything that was published on the First World War and the February Revolution. "Generals, Cadets, officials, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks... All, all, all! In fact, we didn't even have to look for anything in second-hand bookstores. The library of The Red Wheel is huge. Thousands of storage units," recalls Natalia Dmitrievna.

How did "Reflections ..." appear? Work on" March of the Seventeenth " went on for ten years-until 1986. The writer concluded each of the four books with a summing-up chapter. His wife, a first-time reader and editor, tried to convince him that these chapters, which were completely journalistic, had no place in a literary text, but should be given an independent life. In the so-called "Diary of Roman" there is an entry from March 27, 1985: "Alya (Natalia Dmitrievna's home name. - Editor's note) has long been earnestly urging me to remove the four final review chapters from March: that it undermines the artist's work by exposing journalism instead, overturns the reader's achieved conviction with directness and sharpness... I resisted for more than half a year: there is a pleasure to express myself directly, to bring my judgments to precise wording."

The writer hesitates, but still agrees with his wife's argument. So there was an independent journalistic work "Reflections on the February Revolution". They were first published in the magazine "Moscow" in 1995. And in 2007, Rossiyskaya Gazeta published them as a booklet.

Solzhenitsyn worked seven hours a day on The Red Wheel

As the writer's widow recalls, during the years of working on the Red Wheel, Alexander Isaevich lived intently, according to his own established schedule. He got up early, had a cup of coffee for breakfast, and was at his desk by eight o'clock. With short breaks, he worked until two or three o'clock in the afternoon. At five o'clock or half past five, when the children returned from school, there was a general family dinner. And in the evening he always read.

A more informative, but longer retelling of the same story can be found in the following article from 15 February 2017 by Vladimir Nordvik: 'The whole text is permeated with pain'. Natalia Solzhenitsyna - about how her husband created the famous article "Reflections on the February Revolution" English readers may translate the Russian text with a browser application.

 

[thorbiorn]

In this post, a little more about Solzhenitsyn, what he writes about the beginning of the Russian revolution with notes from a lady-in-wating to the last dowager Empress, some excerpts from Collingwood's The Idea of History, followed by comments on Solzhenitsyn's work, The Red Wheel and how the perspective Solzhenitsyn gives of the last Romanov might differ from the view the Greek historian Polybius could have given, assuming Collingwood's summary of Polybius is valid.

The murder of Rasputin as the first move towards a revolution
Picking up from the last post:

While the novels have elements of fiction in a historical authentic setting, an article by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, related to the series about March 1917, was published in the Russian media RG.ru 16.02.2017 00:00 as Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'Reflections on the February Revolution'. which is the translated Russian title of Александр Солженицын: "Размышления над Февральской революцией"

The article begins, if translated with DeepL,:

The three monarchists who decided to eliminate Rasputin in order to save the crown and the dynasty confidently stepped onto that slippery slope which so often deceives us with its historical appearance: the consequences of our most certain actions suddenly turn out to be the opposite of our expectations. It seemed that even the worst haters of the Russian monarchy could not have devised a more striking scourge for it than the figure of Rasputin. Such an ingenious combination, that it was precisely the Russian peasant who disgraced the Orthodox monarchy, and precisely in the form of holiness. The reading public and the uneducated masses were, in their own way, disillusioned by slander about the throne and even about treason against the throne.

But by removing this sore spot, they only paved the way for further destruction. The murder, as a concrete act, was noticed far beyond the circle that was considered public opinion - among workers, soldiers and even peasants. And the participation of two members of the dynasty in the murder led to the conclusion that the rumours about Rasputin and the tsarina were true, that even the grand dukes were forced to avenge the honour of the sovereign. The impunity of the murderers was widely noticed and led to a dark interpretation: either the murderers were completely right, or there was no truth to be found at the top, and so the Tsar's relatives killed the only man who had managed to get there. Thus, Rasputin's murder turned out to be not a gesture protecting the monarchy, but the first shot of the revolution, the first real step of the revolution - along with the Zemgorov congresses in those same days of December. Rasputin was gone, and discontent was boiling - so who now, if not the tsar?

For another comment on the murder of Rasputin, and what preceded, there is a record by Countess Zinaide Mengden (1878-1950), who was a lady-in-waiting (1912-1928) to the dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark) (1947-1928), whose husband Alexander III of Russia was assassinated in 1894. In Countess Zinaide Mengden's Memoirs. H Hagerup, Copenhagen, 1943 (The original title is: Grevinde Zinaide Mengdens Erindringer. H Hagerup, København, 1943), one finds if translated:

On 1 May 1916, we travelled to Kiev again. The intention was that we would only stay there for about fourteen days this time too. Little did we know that we would never return to Petrograd. I had seen my beloved brother Georgi for the last time in this life. (p. 92)

They did not return after two weeks. The Wikis for the dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, and her daughter-in-law, the then current Empress, Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse), indicate they did not get along. About Maria Feodorovna:

Nevertheless, despite her social tact, she did not get along well with her daughter-in-law, Tsarina Alexandra, holding her responsible for many of the woes that beset her son Nicholas and the Russian Empire in general. She was appalled with Alexandra's inability to win favour with the public, and also that she did not give birth to an heir until almost ten years after her marriage, after bearing four daughters. The fact that Russian court custom dictated that an empress dowager took precedence over an empress consort, combined with the possessiveness that Maria had of her sons, and her jealousy of Empress Alexandra only served to exacerbate tensions between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Sophie Buxhoeveden remarked of this conflict: "Without actually clashing they seemed fundamentally unable … to understand one another", and her daughter Olga commented: "they had tried to understand each other and failed. They were utterly different in character, habits and outlook". Maria was sociable and a good dancer, with an ability to ingratiate herself with people, while Alexandra, though intelligent and beautiful, was very shy and closed herself off from the Russian people.

There is much more to the issue, but returning to the 1916 stay in Kiev, a few months later her anniversary is celebrated:

14 September marked the 50th anniversary of the arrival in Russia of the Empress, the Danish Princess Dagmar. From Tsarskoye Selo, where she was staying at the time, she had sent the first telegram in Russian, thanking the Kuban Cossacks who had sent her a welcome address. This day was to be commemorated here in Kiev in 1916 with a festive breakfast to which 50 people were invited. Afterwards, everyone was photographed in the garden.
[...]
Month after month passed without the Empress seeming to consider returning to Petrograd. She never spoke to any of us about the reason for this delay. But we all had our thoughts on the matter. There were certainly various reasons, and one of them was probably that she believed she could be of more use here in Kiev than in Petrograd, which was so far from the front. It was as if people in Kiev took the events of the war much more seriously because they were so close to them.

And next comes the announcement of the murder of Rasputin, and their reaction:

On the evening of 17 December, we were sitting at the tea when Prince Dolgorouky was called to the telephone because the Governor of Kiev, Count Alexei Ignatiew, wished to speak to him. He informed him that Rasputin was dead. A sigh of relief escaped from all of us. But when we learned two days later that Rasputin had been killed by Prince Yussupov, our relief turned to a sombre mood.

What would happen? What consequences could this murder have? This act was the first open act of disobedience against the Emperor.
(pp. 99-100)

The Wiki for Maria Feodorovna gives several statements that indicates she sensed the danger for the Empire, and her son, many years before the death of Rasputin and things really got serious.

The dowager Empress and Zinaide were also in Kiev during the February revolution of 1917.

One day, we drove past Stolypin's statue. Among other things, Prime Minister Stolypin had worked for an agrarian reform whereby every farmer became the owner of his own farm and land. But such a reform could create satisfaction among the people, which did not suit the revolutionaries, who saw no fertile ground for their rebellious ideas. Therefore, they shot him in the theatre in Kiev in September 1911. Now we saw that even the statue was covered with a red cloak. (Around mid-March 1917) (p. 109)

In the book there is a report about the last meeting with her son, Tsar Nicholas, in Mogilev in what is now Belarus, at the time of his abdication.

A Collingwood perspective on Solzhenitsyn?
In the book by R. G. Collingwood, discussed in this thread. Collingwood's Idea of History & Speculum Mentis there are statements like:

History cannot be scientifically written unless the historian can re-enact in his own mind the experience of the people whose actions he is narrating. (40/313)

The historian who studies a civilization other than his own can apprehend the mental life of that civilization only by re-enacting its experience for himself. (153/313)

The historian not only re-enacts past thought, he re-enacts it in the context of his own knowledge and therefore, in re-enacting it, criticizes it, forms his own judgement of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it. (201/313)

Is a mental re-enactment what Solzhenitsyn is trying to do in his books about the time? I tried to find the Russian Wiki of the Red Wheel books (Красное колесо) and went to the critics, among them, there are:

According to philologist and philosopher Aza Alibekovna Taho-Godi: ‘...Solzhenitsyn is absolutely right when he says that it was February that tragically changed the fate of Russia. He sought to show the path to this tragedy in his ’Red Wheel". It is read less than The Gulag Archipelago, and unjustifiably so. Alexei Fedorovich Losev said that no one, like Solzhenitsyn, was able to so brilliantly portray the “social passions” and “social neuroses” that afflict society."[16] 21.08.2017 20:53 Aza Tahoe-Godi: Freedom to do nothing is not freedom at all from RG.ru

Lydia Chukovskaya (Wiki) had a more difficult relationship with the book. There was

[Lydia] Chukovskaya wrote about her attitude: ‘I stand firm: the war there is magnificent, and Bestuzhev's courses are tasteless, empty, in general — the rear, the world — unsuccessful, especially women and love’[14: Chukovskaya Lydia. From the diary. Memories. — Moscow: Vremya, 2014. — P. 409.].

Another comment on the book is from Anna Samoilovna Berzer and found in a Russian language Radio Svoboda article A destroyed wheel. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his editor. (Radio Svoboda is another name for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty). It is from 05 June 2020 and the meaning, overall appears, at least in part, to reduce the work of Solzhenitsyn by stringing together excerpts from her diary written in 1970 and 1984 and leaving it to the reader the less easy task of finding the necessary context, to broaden the perspective. I will not try, but relevant to the idea of mental reenactment on the part of Solzhenitzyn is what Anna Berzer noted down in her diary from November 20, 1970 to November 28, 1970:

The war is shown too much from the inside of that time, and the rest of society is too much from the present.

From the above opinions of parts of his work, it appears that Solzhenitsyn indeed attempted a mental reenactment of what happened during the period treated in the Red Wheel.

Solzhenitsyn and his frustrations with Tsar Nicholas II
Joining what the wife of Solzhenitsyn said in the article mentioned earlier, see 'The whole text is permeated with pain'. Natalia Solzhenitsyna - about how her husband created the famous article "Reflections on the February Revolution" and
How Solzhenitsyn's 'Reflections on the February Revolution' appeared as well as other statements found in A destroyed wheel. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his editor, it is certain that the author, even as a student was very passionate about the topic. I suspect that his writing was more than just a sharing of a skill or an educational mission, it was also a way for him as a person to heal and grow.

In Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'Reflections on the February Revolution', Solzhenitsyn laments the many poor decisions the Nicholas II, during the time of his reign. Considering that the Empress, his wife had significant influence, I wondered how his marriage began. Was that the first major mistake? In the Wiki for his mother Maria Feodorovna, there is about the marriage of her son:

Nicholas had long had his heart set on marrying Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, a favourite grandchild of Queen Victoria. Despite the fact that she was their godchild, neither Alexander III nor Maria approved of the match. Nicholas summed up the situation as follows: "I wish to move in one direction, and it is clear that Mama wishes me to move in another – my dream is to one day marry Alix." Maria and Alexander found Alix shy and somewhat peculiar. They were also concerned that the young Princess was not possessed of the right character to be Empress of Russia. Nicholas's parents had known Alix as a child and formed the impression that she was hysterical and unbalanced, which may have been due to the loss of her mother and youngest sister, Marie, to diphtheria when she was just six. It was only when Alexander III's health was beginning to fail that they reluctantly gave permission for Nicholas to propose.

In the Wiki for Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse), there is:

A granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra was one of the most famous royal carriers of hemophilia and passed the condition to her son, Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia.

In 1884, Alix attended the wedding of her sister Elisabeth to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in St. Petersburg. At this wedding, the 12-year-old Alix met the 16-year-old Tsesarevich Nicholas, nephew of the groom and heir-apparent to the Imperial throne of Russia. In his diary Nicholas called Alix "sweet little Alix" and declared "we love each other." He gave her a brooch as a sign of his affection, and they scratched their names into a windowpane.

In January 1890, Alix visited her sister Ella in Russia. She and Nicholas skated together, met at tea parties, and played badminton. Nicholas wrote in his diary: "It is my dream to one day marry Alix H. I have loved her for a long time, but more deeply and strongly since 1889 when she spent six weeks in Petersburg. For a long time, I have resisted my feeling that my dearest dream will come true."

You can also read how Queen Victoria for all her doting, caring, letters and matchmaking attempts were not able to change the mind of her grandchild.

In the Wiki for Nicholas, there is:

The wedding of Nicholas and Alix was held at the grand church at the Winter Palace on 26 November 1894 less than a month after Alexander III's funeral, before the start of Lent, and because of the six-month mourning period for Alexander III was still undergoing, the wedding was modest and quiet. However, it is said that the old women following the wedding shook their heads and said about the new empress: "She came to us from behind the coffin..."

Was this marriage manipulated from 4D STS, was it a pre-incarnational pact or mission? From Nicholas' perspective, he married for love, and they were together until the end, and beyond?

They were canonised in 2000 by the Russian Orthodox Church as passion bearers. In 2008, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation decided to legally rehabilitate Nicholas, his family, and 52 other close associates of the Imperial family who had been persecuted or murdered, ruling that they were unlawfully killed, challenging the Bolshevik justification for the 1917 revolution.

Above, there was the word passion bearer which:

can be defined as a person who faces his or her death in a Christ-like manner. Unlike martyrs, passion bearers are not directly killed for their faith, though they hold to that faith with piety and true love of God.

A marriage for love, that ended with them being passion bearers, might be acceptable, but Solzhenitsyn also considers the issue of the conflict between duty to family and duty to nation. From Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'Reflections on the February Revolution':

On those days of March 1st, his main impulse was family! - wife! - son! As a good family man, did it ever occur to him to think of the millions of people who were also family, bound to him by their oath, and the millions who were quietly committed to the monarchical idea?

He chose to remove himself from the burden.

The weak king betrayed us.

All of us, for the future.

By the Supreme Commander-in-Chief's escape from the Headquarters, General Alexeyev was elevated to the position of supreme judge. He was still sitting at the table due to his illness, and he was only the Chief of Staff, but all of Russia's military forces were left in his care during the crucial days of the Petrograd Revolution, which meant that the entire historical fate of the Russian state was entrusted to him without any control or response.
[...]
If there was a fateful night in Russian history, a night that condensed the fate of the country into a few hours, a night that brought about several revolutions at once, it was the night of March 1-2, 1917.

Again coming back to R.G. Collingwood, in The Idea of History he presents his understanding of Polybius (200-118 BC):

Polybius does not think that the study of history will enable men to avoid the mistakes of their predecessors and surpass them in worldly success; the success to which the study of history can lead is for him an inner success, a victory not over circumstance but over self. What we learn from the tragedies of its heroes is not to avoid such tragedies in our own lives, but to bear them bravely when fortune brings them. The idea of fortune, tyche, bulks largely in this conception of history, and imports into it a new element of determinism. As the canvas on which the historian paints his picture grows larger, the power attributed to the individual will grows less. Man finds himself no longer master of his fate in the sense that what he tries to do succeeds or fails in proportion to his own intelligence or lack of it; his fate is master of him, and the freedom of his will is shown not in controlling the outward events of his life but in controlling the inward temper in which he faces these events. Here Polybius is applying to history the same Hellenistic conceptions which the Stoics and Epicureans applied to ethics. Both these schools agreed in thinking that the problem of moral life was not how to control events in the world around us, as the classical Greek moralists had thought, but how to preserve a purely inward integrity and balance of mind when the attempt to control outward events had been abandoned. For Hellenistic thought, self-consciousness is no longer, as it was for Hellenic thought, a power to conquer the world; it is a citadel providing a safe retreat from a world both hostile and intractable.
(36-37/313)

It seems then that while Solzhenitsyn can find errors of judgement in the last Romanov administration, Polybius might not have been quite as discouraged by the outcome for the last Tsar. I can sympathize with with the position of Polybius, but if a person does not even try to learn, including learning from the past choices, also of others, then it seems to be wrong. And certainly a person in a position of responsibility for many other people has opportunities to learn what is relevant within his field and could try to act accordingly. Maybe for all the errors, Solzhenitsyn brings up, there were also positives, the Wiki for Nicholas II ends the entry about his legacy saying:

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, present-day Russian historians give Nicholas a more positive assessment, particularly when evaluating the reforms made by the Russian state during his reign.

Today the Russian Government promotes the importance of traditional families with more children within stable relationships as well as religious values. On these points the last Tsar and his family managed. Even if it did not survive, it left an example.