What's wrong with Russia? It was never part of Rome.

By Ssolbergj - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2992630

SPQR Senātus Populus que Rōmānus.Translated, the Senate and People of Rome.  The motto of the Roman Empire, whose legions marched under that banner in service of its Emperors.

"I will burn other people's villages with a cheerful smile."

"It ain’t a war crime if you had fun."

"Behind us, there is a house on fire. Well, let it burn. One more, one less."

Russian wall scribbling in liberated Ukrainian territory.

What's wrong with Russia?

People have been asking that question for years, maybe centuries.

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. 

Winston Churchill

No, it's really not.

What it is, is something it isn't.  It was never part of the Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire was the most extensive expression of the Greco-Roman world and their culture.  The Greeks had commenced the work that Rome would end up finishing, or rather the Catholic Church would end up finishing, well prior to Rome's rise, however.  The great Greek philosophers came into being prior to even the expansion of the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great, infusing its culture with the outlook of the Western world.  Under Alexander the Greeks spread throughout the Mediterranean region, but the Romans picked it up, and the Greek world view, and massively expanded it.

Indeed, the influence of the Greeks and the Romans was so extensive that a student of early Christianity can't help but be impressed by the extent to which Christ and his disciples lived in a Judea that had been heavily impacted by the Greeks. The version of the Old Testament that is quoted in the New Testament pretty clear is the Septuagint, the Greek version.  Most, maybe all, of the New Testament was originally written in Greek.  Thoughts expressed in the New Testament are such that there have been those who have speculated that they could not have been expressed in Hebrew, had Hebrew remained the language of the Israelites, and that therefore Divine Providence was at work.  Early Christian Church fathers applied Greek philosophy to their understanding of Theology.¹ 

The Romans built on what they obtained from the Greeks, and they built the concept of a multicultural empire.  Rome started off a city state monarchy but in the end, it was a multicultural empire in which anyone within it could become a Roman citizen under certain circumstances.  Its unifying features was a uniform legal code and two languages, Latin and Greek.  You could be a cultural German, but if you could learn Latin and adhere to Rome's legal code, you had a chance to be as Roman as an Italian born in Rome.

The Church, and there was only one, came in and added the concept that there was only one moral code for everyone in the world, and your status and culture didn't trump that.  It also came in with a strong ethos of support for the plight of the poor and the equality of everyone before God.  Real women's rights came in with the Church, and the end of slavery was made inevitable by it as well.  The supremacy in religious matters of the Roman pontiff pointed out that even the government was subject to the Natural Law, and that it didn't create it.

We are all Romans.

The influence of Rome spread well beyond the Empire, even during the Roman age, and that was through Christianity.  Rome made it all the way up to the Teutoburg, but not beyond that.  Christianity did, however.  It may have taken the Northern Crusades to bring the Poles in, but brave missionaries to bring in the Scandinavians, but they did.

In the East, the Baltic was part of the Greek world, and hence the Roman world.  St. Andrew the apostle travelled into what is the southern Ukraine, via the Black Sea, and preached at least in Scythia.  Some maintain that he saild the Dneiper and preached in Kyiv.

Ukraine was the subject of missionary work in the 800s.  St. Cyril and Methodius, brothers, passed through Ukraine during their missionary work.  Western Ukraine, which is where the Ukrainian Catholic Church has its presence today, was Christianized first.

St. Cyril and Methodius.

Under St. Vladimir The Great, a Kyivan king claimed by both the Ukrainians and the Russians, the Kyivan Rus were firmly brought into the Church.   But of note, Vladimir had been born a pagan and converted to the Church (again, there was only one) in 988 after traveling to the West and studying the non-pagan religions. He died in 1015 at age 57.

Now, 1015 is a very late date.  St. Andrew had been in the region in 55AD.  St. Cyril and Methodius in the late 800s.  But as late as 988 paganism still existed in the lands of the Rus.

And in 1054, the Great Schism commenced.

Now, the Rus did take to Christianity, of that there can be no doubt. But the Great Schism put their Church outside the Latin world to some degree.  Islam was already on the rise, and the Byzantine Empire would fall in 1453.  In 1448 the Russian Church obtained de facto independence, although in 1439 history nearly took a different course with Russian Orthodox representatives recognized Rome as the head of the Church at the Council of Florence. Sadly, their union was prevented from taking effect.

So basically, the Russians were on the edge of the world. The Great Schism, the collapse of the Roman Empire, and then the collapse of the Byzantine kept them there.  Ukraine had been part of the Greco-Roman world, and to some degree, it remains so, especially the further west in Ukraine you go.

And this matters.

Outside of the Moscow elite and a very small urban elite, Russia is one great big blue-collar country.

Fiona Hill

Russia definitely has a cultured development and the Russians are a great people. But they're a people where western concepts have never taken root, including the concept that power devolves from the people, and not the other way around. Even those who have attempted, and there have been many, to change that, have uniformly failed.

It's a culture that has developed great works of art and literature, while remaining insular and focused on itself.  Outside of Russia, everyone is some sort of odd stranger, and the Russians have, from time to time, imagined themselves as the archetype of Slavs.  The culture has a hard time not accepting that to some degree.

And it's a rough place to live in part because of this.  People die young, often due to conditions and alcoholism.  Male deaths outstrip women's by quite some margin.² Brutality and acceptance of horrible conditions exists where it has departed elsewhere.  Russia's military retains an ethos of cruelty that stems back to ancient times and manifests itself in horrific ancient behaviors. 

And hence, there's really no mystery.  

Russia wasn't part of the Greco-Roman world.

Ukraine, however, was.

Footnotes.

1. There's a common myth that Islam preserved the works of the Greek philosophers, and Christians got them from them.

In reality, Islam got the texts of the Greek philosophers from Chaldean Christians, who had preserved them.  Latin Christians did get them from Islamic Arabs, but it is important to note that Islamic Arabs got them from Chaldean Christians.  

As it happened, Hellenized Islamist theologians were later dismissed and regarded as heretical in Islam.

2.  As an odd expression of this, it's often frequently noted that younger Russian women are disproportionately beautiful, before age and conditions change this at a rate not experienced in the West.   It's been seriously suggested that this is due to natural selection, as the population of women always exceeds that of men, thereby giving physically attractive women a heightened competitive genetic advantage.

A couple of interesting items. . .

 to ponder.

View from the S H Knight (geology) Building in 1986.

Recent research has indicated that humans reached the Faeroe Islands at least 300 years prior to the Vikings doing so.

This doesn't surprise me a bit, and apparently it's been more or less known for some time, and its what I would have expected, but new studies, involving obtaining DNA from the bottom of a lake, has proven it conclusively.

Evidence of really old sheep defecation was found down there.  Maybe sort of gross sounding in a way, but really cool nonetheless.  So not only was early colonization much earlier than guessed at, but it was true colonization.  I.e, we know about this place and we're bringing our sheep.

Really cool, in my opinion, is that part of the groundbreaking research was done by Dr. Lorelei Curtin of the University of Wyoming. She is a post-doctoral researcher at the university's Department of Geology and Geophysics, of which I'm a graduate.

She specializes, I'd note, in climate research and another study just out notes that global cooling seems to be brought about by global warming. Something I was taught when a student in that department some 35 or so years ago.

Graduates of the other department that I'm a graduate of, the College of Law, have not pegged me out on the pride meter much as time has gone on, but the Department of Geology and Geophysics is different.

Well, go Pokes.

I'll note this as well. The Vikings first settled Iceland starting in 874 and Greenland around 980.  I'm guessing that the last date is correct, but I'll bet that somebody was on Iceland by 874. Rather obviously, the Vikings weren't great at recording who exactly was where they went, when they got there, as the Faeroe Island discovery more or less proves.

Greenland?

 The White House Retweeted

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 15h15 hours ago

Denmark is a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time....

43,699 replies19,488 retweets94,918 likes

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What on earth?

There is a point at which the news becomes so surreal, you just can't quite grasp that something is really in the news.  The bizarre news on the President making sounds on purchasing Greenland is news of that type.  The New York Times, no friend of President Trump's headlined an article on this in this fashion:

Trump, Greenland, Denmark. Is This Real Life?

Or a Peter Sellers movie?

Whatever a person thinks of Trump, or the New York Times, the Times pretty much nailed it.  It feels sort of like something out of The Mouse That Roared, or something like that. It's really hard to grasp what's going on here and a person has to suspect its some sort of odd news cycle diversion.

The story started off with what seemed like a joke and then evolved into something that just seemed like innocent ignorance, combined with a discount of the original suggestion.  But now its escalated to cancelling a state visit with the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, who made it plain that purchasing the Danish possession was not going to be discussed.  Trump has since referred to Frederiksen as "nasty".

The irony there is that while Frederiksen is a Danish Social Democrat, she's a populist conservative on the European scale.  As Prime Minister she's opposed liberal immigration into Denmark, supported confiscation of items from refugees, and supported banning the burka.  She's critical of globalism and has made open comments about Islam being a barrier to integration in Denmark in a way that no American politician would dare.

In other words, Trump and Frederiksen should get along fine.*

Instead, we now have the American populist President insulting the Danish populist Prime Minister over Greenland.

I'm quite certain that 100% of the leadership in the President's party, as well as probably 98% of the people who work in the Administration, have the same reaction. Greenland?

The United States isn't going to buy Greenland.  Denmark isn't going to "sell" Greenland.  Greenland is self administering and if it has a change of status of any type, and it could, it would become an independent nation, something that it more or less would like to do, and which with its independent status, it more or less nearly is.  In my view, that's what it should be, which is not to say that its really actively asking to be that.

The flag of Greenland

Moreover, there was never an era when the US was going to "buy" Greenland.  If the country ever had any interest in doing that, it would have been about the same time as we fought the War of 1812.

88% of the residents of Greenland are Inuit.  Culturally, that places Greenland a lot closer to northern Canada, which isn't purposing to annex it, than it does to the United States.  If Greenland, however, was to join a North American nation, it'd be Canada. . . not the United States.

Greenland has belonged, in one fashion or another, to Scandinavian countries since 986 when it was first settled by Norwegians and Icelanders.  At that time, all Scandinavians, while not unified in rule, were close in culture and the distinction between a Norwegian, Swede or Dane was more theoretical than real.   Hitting Greenland during the Medieval Climatic Optimum, Scandinavians successfully colonized the coastal areas and a Christian Scandinavian population lived there all the way into the 1400s.  At the same time Greenland was also inhabited by the Dorset Paleo Indian culture, which also disappeared from the region around 1500.

The 15th and 16th Centuries were not kind.

As the Dorsets declined the Thule came in. They're an Inuit people and they make up the vast majority of Greelanders today, as noted.  The Danes came back in as early as 1605 when they started a dedicated effort to relocate the Scandinavian communities of Greenland which they had never forgotten, unaware that those colonies had been abandoned.  Still, a 200 year long recollection that they had been there is impressive.

Denmark and Norway shared a joint monarchy during this period which dissolved in 1814.  Norway went into a sort of unhappy union with Sweden shortly thereafter, but it maintained a fair degree of independence until Norway formally left that union in the early 20th Century.  All the way until 1933 Norway, however claimed unoccupied areas of Greenland until that claim was extinguished in favor of Denmark that year.

The first real substantial contact with the United States came in World War Two, during which the U.S. occupied Greenland as Denmark was occupied by Germany.  Greenland basically became self administering during this period but the experience did open up what had been a highly isolated society due to the American presence.  It pushed for self administration after the war but did not achieve it until 1979, in part, and 2009, in full.

It's pulled out of the European Community, which shows how self governing it is.

After World War Two the United States did maintain a military presence in the form of Thule Air Force Base, which was opened in 1943 and is still in use.  The US actually offered to buy Greenland at that time, offering Denmark $100,000,000 in 1946.  As Greenland was much less independent than it is now, perhaps this is not surprising.  The US had actually pondering buying it once before, in 1867, when Congress put an end to the idea.

In 1867 and 1946, of course, the situation was much different than it is now, in 2019.  Greenland for all practical purposes is independent in everything but name.  Greenland has full internal autonomy but does not administer its own foreign affairs.  With the 2009 arrangement, however, granting fully sovereignty over resources to Greenland, it's assumed that independence is on the horizon.  Greenland still maintains a close association with Denmark, and Danes make up a significant portion of the 12% of the population that's not Thule, but the end of Danish rule is coming.

The beginning of American ownership is not and its a really odd thought that anyone bothered to ask the Danes to sell something that they basically are giving back to the people who live there.  The Danes have never shown any interest in giving up Greenland to another country and remarkably reestablished contact with Greenland after a 200 year absence in the first place.  They contested Norway's claim to an unoccupied portion of it. They've been very clear in their views.

So what brought this about is really a mystery.  To Americans, it's probably just one more distraction, but if you are Greenlandic or Danish, it's no doubt insulting.  And now the insult for the Danes has been compounded.  And for what reason?

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*Which may be trivializing the seriousness of her views.  She's also a strong opponent of legal prostitution in Scandinavia.  Frederiksen is Prime Minister, it should be noted, as head of a minority party in coalition with parties of the left.