And this is a former president of Russia, folks.
I began to analyze his text, and has finally finished, but can see you already did some explaining:
I would still add some to Iron Dimon and finish the quote he gave in the finale to reveal the meaning. I think that not everyone here is familiar with the work of Nikolai Gogol, and what is obvious to almost every Russian is not the case in this audience.
Anyway, here is what I have:
The translation is good enough, but perhaps Medvedev has decided to up the game of using allusions. Without knowing history, politics, and literature, some of the meaning is lost. Below are words and expressions I looked up.
the Lyakhs and the Bandera followers
While it is clear enough what is referred to, I did not know that Lyakhs was a word for Poles. The Wiki has an entry for
Lach
Lach (Polish pronunciation: pronounced [ˈlax]), Lyakh or Ljach is a surname. It was used by East Slavs to refer to Poles.[1] Ethnic Poles in Nowy Sącz (south-eastern Poland) also used the name, referring to themselves as Lachy Sądeckie. According to Paweł Jasienica, it derives from the name of an ancient Polish tribe, the Lendians.[2]
Under
Lendians: there is a map which calls them Lędzianie, it is in the lower right in the border area of present day southeastern Poland and the most western parts of Ukraine, which seems to have been and area of conflict for more than thousand years.
It is suggested that the name "Lędzianie" (*lęd-jan-inъ) derives from the word "lęda" of Proto-Slavic and Old Polish origin, meaning "slash-and-burn field".[1][2]. Therefore it is suggested that the name of the tribe comes from their use of slash-and-burn agriculture, which involved cutting and burning of forests or woodlands to create fields.[2] Accordingly, in this meaning Lendians were woodland-burning farmers,[3] or "inhabitants of fields".[4] Several European nations source their ethnonym for Poles, and hence Poland, from the name of Lendians: Lithuanians (lenkai, Lenkija) and Hungarians (Lengyelország).[5][6]
The
Polish Wiki
Ledzianie (*Ledo + It is derived from the Proto-Slavic and Old Polish word "Leda", which means an area, a plain, an unfinished field intended or suitable for agriculture. [2][3] The tribe's name comes directly from burning and burning wood, which involves cutting down and burning forests to prepare land for farmland. [3] In accordance with this meaning, Ledyanin meant a farmer, "logger"[4].
From the Eng Wiki again:
Gerard Labuda notes that the Rus' originally called a specific tribal group settled around the Vistula river as the Lendians and only later in the 11th and 12th century started to apply the name of the tribe to the entire populace of the "Piast realm" because of their common language.[7]
About their history:
The West Slavs (Lendians and Vistulans) moved into the area of present-day south-eastern Poland, during the early 6th century AD. Around 833, the region inhabited by the Lendians was incorporated into the Great Moravian state. Upon the invasion of the Hungarian tribes into the heart of Central Europe around 899, the Lendians submitted to their authority (Masudi). In the first half of the 10th century, they alongside Krivichs and other Slavic people paid tribute to Igor I of Kiev (DAI).[6]
Here is another map from Polish historians which show the Lendians inhabit the border area between the early Polish state and the Early Kievan Rus.
The description is
Cherven Cities, partly inhabited by the Lendians, as part of Poland under the rule of Mieszko I until 981 AD according to the Polish historiography.
nailing the Bandera scum to the wall on Bankova Street
Bankova Street
[...] houses the Presidential Office of Ukraine and various official residences, notably the House with Chimaeras.
House with Chimaeras
Situated across the street from the President of Ukraine's office at No. 10, Bankova Street, the building has been used as a presidential residence for official and diplomatic ceremonies since 2005.
The
Russian Wiki gives the understanding that Bankova, especially in the Ukraine press is used as the Kremlin, the White House
Polish pans
Pan is a form of polite address used in some Slavic languages: Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian and Belarusian.
Salo is depicted below, Polish vodka needs no explanation
The next part is quite long, and is a comment on the above lard
What might Medvedev allude to by mentioning Salo?
The current UA administration is also described as Saloreich (
Салорейх/lit: lard regime, or lard realm)
It is possible the word actually developed among discontented and reflecting Ukrainians. The first person, I heard was
Tetiana Montian, a Ukrainian lawyer, journalist and blogger, who was
involved with the Orange Revolution:
During the 2004 presidential election, Montyan was responsible for countering election fraud in the Mykolaiv region. Together with other lawyers, she coordinated the work of about 600 members of election commissions and observers[16].
But she was against the Maidan show. In fact, she might be a good reason why Saloreich has become popular. One
VK post from April 2022 has a dictionary of terms she uses or has coined including saloreich:
‘Saloreich was raised by the West to be slaughtered.’
‘The viewers and listeners of Zeleobus are people without critical thinking. And in his speeches, everyone hears what they want to hear and filters out what does not fit into their distorted picture of the world.’
@Montyan
Tatyana's dictionary:
*
Saloreich - the Ukrainian authorities and their followers;
* Zelebobus - Zelensky;
* Saucepan-headed (
кастрюлеголовый) - Maidan supporters and other jumping evil spirits.
Translating the meaning given under
кастрюлеголовый
tj. substantiir., polit. jarg., contemptible. very stupid, poorly thinking (usually about Ukrainians who participated in Euromaidan or supported it and the post-Maidan government)
DeepL translates it as potheads, but it is not in the sense usually understood in English, it can be quite literal:
Saloreich layed out by Tatiana Montian
The short translation above was - "the Ukrainian authorities and their followers" It is more nuanced and Tatiana Montyan explains what she means in the following two Russian videos, to which there is a summary of some points.
Ukraine is a country, which was taken into colonial serfdom on the Maidan, and on the territory of Ukraine was created a a quasi-state colonial education under direct management of the Pentagon and NATO, because all public resources, as you can see for yourself, were thrown to military purposes. Education, medicine, science, culture, all went for military enlistment, militarization, training and ideological brainwashing in the Nazi direction of the fighting comrades. And this included Russians, referring to a Russian nationalist who said that they had won over the Azov, but he was astonished to learn that among them, 4 out of 5 were natural Russians. (This talk as you can hear is from the 2022). She sums it up and moves forward saying that SaloReich is a quasi-state education consisting of two words, salo and reich ... This education was intentionally created with one goal, to destroy the image of Russia, causing maximum damage and flooding the brotherly peoples with blood, one part of this people had been brainwashed by Nazism to a mirror-like shine.
In another:
Who are SALO REICHS? Montyan Tatyana Nikolaevna answers.
Кто такие САЛО РЕЙХИ. Отвечает Монтян Татьяна Николаевна. She begins by saying she has already explained it a million times! (Do a search of the term in Russian on t.me/montyan2 if you wish to verify) In the video Motyan says something similar to the previous one and adds that this system of education took its beginnings in 1993 and was intensified after Maidan. It was preintended for slaughter/(war). She talks about the two words, salo and reich, and gives the understanding, if paraphrased, that salo (Salo/Сало (
UA Wiki) litererally lard), represents pigs and by extension in this context brainwashed people who like pigs are raised for the slaughterhouse/war.
Maybe Medvedev did not mean it that complicated when using Salo, but diving into the word led to new perspectives. Next is:
kick the unwashed serfs out of the Rzeczpospolita altogether
Rzeczpospolita
Rzeczpospolita (pronounced
[ʐɛt͡ʂpɔsˈpɔlita] is a traditional Polish term for a political community founded for the common good. The noun "rzeczpospolita", meaning "public welfare, general good or advantage"
rzecz "thing, matter" and
pospolita "common", is analogous to the Latin
rēs pūblica (
rēs "thing" +
pūblica "public, common"), i.e.
republic, in English also rendered as
commonwealth (historic) and
republic (current).
In modern Polish, the word
rzeczpospolita is used exclusively in relation to the Republic of Poland
Taras Bulba
Now we're just waiting for the newly-appointed Taras Bulba to show up on Bankova and say: "So, my son, did your Lyakhs help you?"
Taras Bulba (Russian: «Тарас Бульба», romanized: Tarás Búl'ba) is a romanticized historical novella set in the first half of the 17th century, written by Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852). It features the elderly Zaporozhian Cossack Taras Bulba and his sons Andriy and Ostap. The sons study at the Kiev Academy and then return home, whereupon the three men set out on a journey to the Zaporizhian Sich (the Zaporizhian Cossack headquarters, located in southern Ukraine) where they join other Cossacks and go to war against Poland.
The story was initially published in 1835 as part of the Mirgorod collection of short stories, but a much expanded version appeared in 1842 with some differences in the storyline. The twentieth-century critic Victor Erlich [ru] described the 1842 text as a "paragon of civic virtue and a force of patriotic edification", contrasting it with the rhetoric of the 1835 version with its "distinctly Cossack jingoism".[1]
Of the two sons, Ostrap ended up with the Poles and was eventually shot by his father. It is quite a harrowing story, really.
In the message from Medvedev, Bankova appears twice
The new President Navrotsky, though a certified Russophobe, has grabbed this issue by the balls and is nailing the Bandera scum to the wall on Bankova Street.
This indicates a threat to the Bandera followers from the west and Poland in particular.
Now we're just waiting for the newly-appointed Taras Bulba to show up on Bankova and say: "So, my son, did your Lyakhs help you?"
Medvedev plays with the idea that a person or a group from within the area of Ukraine opposes what the current group in power is doing. So far, there has not been any serious threat to Zelensky and co, and that is why
we're just waiting because judging from the story and history of the area, it is a possibility that such will arise.
Whereas Medvedev looks at the situations with sparks flying between Poland and Ukraine as a spectator, if one was a president supporting Pole or Ukrainian there would be less to laugh about. Maybe more carrots or sticks from the US or the EU will do, but I have questions for such people?
Is it true as Montyan says that Western powers have set Ukrainians up to be slaughtered in a front against Russia for their own purposes?
Does what Montyan says about the educational system in Ukraine also have a degree of validity for Poland?
To what extend did Poland help to turn Ukraine into a Saloreich?
A part of the modern version of the European values is to not ask too many questions, especially not of the above kind. If both Poles and Ukrainians can agree on that much, then what do they think about Taras Bulba? I already hear the answer, "the author was Gogol and he wrote in Russian". To which I will say, "Fair enough!" and walk away.
Funny thing is, in the video (in Russian) the message is directed to Russian 'democrats' who between 2005 and 2017 were lobbing for the necessity for Russia to join the EU:
