--- Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Chris Doss writes:>Lenin didn't have a drop of
> Russian blood in him<
>
> of what ethnic group was he?
>
> more importantly, do the Russians -- oops, I mean
> the Russkies --
> define the Russian nationality in terms of "blood"?
> Is that the way we
> should define ethnicity?
>
AAAGH You said Russkies! That's my point, sort of. :) "Russkii" in Russian means an ethnic Russian. "Rossiyanin" means a member of an ethnic group considered "native' to Russia, of which there are over 100. (I've made this point before, so apologies to everybody here who's hear this before.) About 80% of the population is russkii, and the rest others. Russia is sort if in the situation the US would be in if it hadn't annihilated the native peoples -- the Russian Empire assimilated them, not killed them, which is why you have all these Russian ethnic republics (the Chuvash, the Tatars, the Chechens, the Buryats, etc.).
Lenin personally was Chuvash and Kalmyk-Cossack on his father's side and Swedish/German/Jewish on his mother's. His Chuvash ancestry is quite visible if you look at his face. He doesn't look remotely Slavic (the Chuvash are a Turkic people -- there's 2 million of them along the Volga).
What "Russianness" means is a big issue about which I peripherally wrote an improvised essay here: http://www.untimely-thoughts.com/index.html?cat=Mar%2016,%202004&type=3&art=435
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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