Roman Shumov

Roman is a historian who sometimes writes for RT. I read a couple of his stories today. I think they are well done. Now I'm wondering if there is American news site that is produced in Russian, and if there is, what does it sound like? Does it sound reasonable like RT does to me, or is it like the Washington Post and The New York Times, full of bullshit and lies? I suppose it matters which stories you choose to read. I don't read anything about Ukraine or Gaza because everyone writing about those two war zones has an ax to grind. Yes, wars are horrible, but that's the way of the world these days, there is always a war going on somewhere. I think it's because people just like to fight and there are 'leaders' who are willing to take advantage of this natural inclination and are able to organize those people into a coherent force.

Anyway, here's a couple of stories by Roman:

• Russian officer, Finnish hero, Hitler’s ally: The fascinating story of Carl Mannerheim - 80 years ago Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim became President of Finland. An extraordinary person, he was a military commander and statesman in both Russia and Finland, and left behind a controversial legacy in each country.
• Beyond their 790-mile shared border and 108 years of being part of the same state, Moscow and Helsinki have other things in common: their complicated attitudes toward Carl Gustav Mannerheim. Once hailed as a hero in both countries, Mannerheim was a Russian army officer who became Finland’s president during the Second World War. His legacy is fraught with ambiguity and marked by countless lost lives, both Russian and Finnish. This article explores who Mannerheim was and why monuments dedicated to him are frequently splashed with red paint on both sides of the Finland-Russia border.
• The mother of Rus towns: How a legendary Russian city ended up in Ukraine - Once the heart of the ancient kingdom of Rus, it was made capital of Soviet Ukraine in 1934.
• This paragraph rang a bell: "In the 9th century, a country emerged which would come to be known as Kievan Rus, the homeland of the ancestors of modern-day Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. The backbone of this state was a network of river trade routes. These routes began in Scandinavia, traversed the Baltic Sea to the Gulf of Finland (near present-day St. Petersburg), and split in two. One route headed east to the Volga River and then to the Caspian Sea, skirting Iran and Azerbaijan before reaching the Arab lands. The other route went south through Novgorod and down the Dnieper to the Black Sea, leading to Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire’s capital. Iron, wax, furs, linen, weapons, and slaves were sent south; north came intricate metalwork, books, and, most crucially, silver." - Reminds of Vikings: Valhalla
• Ruins of Yugoslavia: How Russia learned that NATO poses a threat - The US-led military bloc’s illegal strikes on Belgrade in the spring of 1999 forever changed relations between the West and Moscow

New-to-me words:

hecatomb

• (in ancient Greece or Rome) a great public sacrifice, originally of a hundred oxen." After Pythagoras discovered his fundamental theorem he sacrificed a hecatomb of oxen"
• an extensive loss of life.

P. S. Map of places mentioned in the story about Carl Mannerheim:

Finland

Secret Underground Airbases

I'm looking at the Military Photos dot net website this morning and there is a post talking about a military air base in Northwest Iraq, so I look it up on Google Maps and sure enough, there it is, until I zoom in for a closer look and then it disappears and is replaced by an image of the airport that was there before. Well, that's kind of curious, but not all that interesting. Let's see what else there is to see around here. I zoom out and notice a jag in the border with Jordan. Jordan is kind of a funny shaped country anyway, what with that "hatchet handle" (one of my school teachers' terms) sticking out to the East. Who knows why it is that way, but this jag is in the end of the handle, and it's not all that big, maybe 10 miles across. This is the middle of the desert. Why would anyone care where the fool border is way out here? Well, maybe there is something here worth quibbling over. Zoom in a bit and I find there is something, an old, abandoned air base. Look it up on Wikipedia and find that it is one of five built by the Yugoslavians 35 years ago. Okay, crazed despot has dreams of many giant airbases in the middle of nowhere. Why? No explanation for crazy. But in the Wikipedia article (and repeated in several similar articles on similar places) is this:

In addition, underground facilities that could shelter between four and ten aircraft on average were constructed. In order to build these the Yugoslavs used equipment and construction techniques identical to that use in underground oil-storage depots, additionally concealing the extension and the true purpose of the whole project. The underground facilities were all hardened to withstand a direct hit by a tactical nuclear bomb, buried up to 50 meters below the ground and consisted of the main aircraft "hangar" (consisting of two floors in several cases, connected by 40ts hydraulic lifts), connected with operations, maintenance, and logistical facilities via a net of underground corridors.

Well, that's just crazy, but when you are dealing with the military and paranoia, nothing is too far round the bend, so I go looking for confirmation. I don't find any, but I do find reports of underground airbases in Albania and China. Albania's look a little sad. Hard to tell about the Chinese. Well, they are inscrutable.