Dear Readers:
I know, I know, I have used this joke before. It’s the ultimate clickbait.
We are, of course, talking about a town called New York in the Donetsk Oblast. There is a famous saying that Americans only study geography when it is time to go to war. That’s probably true for other peoples as well. In the course of this Ukrainian war, we have learned about some interesting, and unexpected toponyms such as Sacco and Vanzetti and also New York, Donetsk.
To the North of Donetsk and West of Gorlovka, the town of New York has been, and is to this day, unbelievably, still in the hands of the Ukrainian army. Perhaps that is going to change, though, as the Russian army prepares for its push into Slavyansk and Kramatorsk.
According to this story by reporter Mikhail Mironov, Russian aviation started dropping bombs, of the RBK-500 type, on this town, after they noticed some Ukrainian military equipment concentrated there.
How the town got its unusual name: We recall that this settlement was founded by American Mennonites, whom the Russian Empress Catherine II invited in to farm the land. The name New York could have been humorous or ironic, or possibly just an homage to the American pioneers. In later eras, the name of the town was changed to Novgorodskoe, but in 2021 the Ukrainians changed it back to New York, probably as a way of ingratiating themselves with the Americans.
If Zelensky could, he would probably rename every Russian town after some American city or public figure.
Awful Avalanche 
Tupelo, Chatanooga, Little Rock — the possibilities are endless. Davy Crockettesville Tajikistan has a nice ring to it.
Mind you, Mennonites to Russia is a bit insane. The Soviets gifted Canada with the Dukabors, a set of nitwits who cavorted in the nude on the prairies, much to the disgust of even our First Nation folks huddled in buffalo robes on reserves.
And of course, in the early 1960s, I got to watch from our house in Nova Scotia, a Russian trawling fleet with mother ships trawling up fish in the Bay of Fundy between my location and New Brunswick. The lights were pretty at night. Hint: look at a map of the Bay of Fundy and learn some geography.
As an aside, there are more than 20 towns in God’s Own United States of America named Moss-cow!
So frigging what?
Back to the Fundy. The Soviets claimed that anything beyond 12 miles either side was international waters – it’s about 45 miles wide is the Fundy. Our fishermen were apoplectic. I mean, what with the Soviets and Portuguese and Spaniards, our fishing grounds were wiped out by 1980. It wasn’t as if Canadian fishermen were draining the Barents Sea of valuable Soviet-leaning cod. Nah, it was just Khrushchev being an arsehole.
I’m convinced no nation is a saint, some are just less bad than others at different points in time.
I dunno, is there a hamlet somewhere in the once USSR named Burton-on-Trent? That would have raised the tone of the place.
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Well, issue similar to what you describe for Bay of Fundy happened in Sea of Okhotsk. There is an area in middle of it with a nickname of Peanut Hole. From 1991 onwards various fishing fleets barged in and virtually destroyed fishing stocks in just a couple of years.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_Hole
Russians managed to arrange a halt to this and eventually got UN to have it declared as part of Russian continental shelf and thus under Russian control when it comes to resource management.
Perhaps Canada should do same for Bay of Fundy, if they have not already done that. It certainly looks like its part of continental shelf.
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Whether the entire Bay of Fundy is considered to be part of the Canadian continental shelf may depend as much on politics and international negotiations as on geology, and so its status may change over time. (Just guessing here).
I’m far from being a student of geology, myself, but I’ve lived on the Fundy shore and was given to understand that Nova Scotia came to be where it is as a result of continental drift, and is part of a different geological structure from what I’ll call the mainland. The Bay itself is a rift basin.
Couple of links for fun:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meguma_terrane
https://bluebeachfossilmuseum.com/history-geology/
Lots of Canadians here. Lots of compatriots.
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“Mind you, Mennonites to Russia is a bit insane.”
I guess you mean that statement: “was founded by American Mennonites”
I am somewhat familiar with the Mennonites, as our area as well that of the neighbouring province of Alberta were/are full of them, and we had around FSJ several colonies of old style Mennonites, non-colonies of new style Mennonites, plus some Hutterites and other religious non denominational Christian colonies from the Hippy Age thrown in.
I am not aware that Mennonites emigrated from the USA or Canada to Russia, afaik the emigration, fleeing from persecution in Western Europe was both to the NA continent and to Russia.
In Russia they created – like in NA, quite successful colonies and industries. Most of them however fled from Russia to Canada, NA and S- America when they faced oppression and often violence during the Bolshevik revolution.
The history of the Mennonites and their settlements and movements is complicated, so maybe there were some who moved to Russia from the USA.
From one of my Mennonite co-workers I received a quite substantial book: “Diese Steine”, of the Mennonite History in Russia, of the over 600 pages I only have read so far about 100.
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“The Soviets gifted Canada with the Dukabors”
Aside from Mennonites, of course living in BC, I have met a few Doukhobors.
They were not a gift from the Soviets, they were a gift in 1899 from the Czar.
https://bcanuntoldhistory.knowledge.ca/1920/doukhobors-protest
The Sons of Freedom was a splinter group not willing to agree to especially the land registration laws, and they were those responsible for the naked protests, and some violence that actually went against the beliefs of non violence by the majority of the members of the Doukhobors.
https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/sons-freedom-doukhobors-saskatchewan-win-communal-land-holding-canada-1900-1907
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Since Yalensis’s comment section is as full of Canajuns as a bowl of poutine is full of squeaky cheese, and yer yarnin’ about Mennonites, I wonder how many of you Canooks watch “Letterkenny”? (Comedy TV series set in a rural Ontario town)
One sub-group of characters in that rustic ville is the Dyck family, a clan of straight-laced Mennonites. They’re the sort that keeps their clothes on, which are home-made 1800s-looking attire. The non-religious characters often refer to the Mennonites as “Schmellies.” Do any of you Mennonite-aware Canadians know why? One Letterkenny character (Dan) said they eat so much garlic that you can smell it sweating out of their pores. A running gag on the show (it’s got a lot of smutty humour) involves double entendres with the family name. Characters include “Lovina Dyck” (get it? “Lovin‘ a Dyck” snigger snigger) Members of the Dyck family often have lines which can be taken to sound sexy, such as “I put my finger in her gash” when talking about how the dad tried to stop the bleeding when his wife cut herself in the kitchen.
There’s a government-run TV service here specialising in foreign-made shows (SBS — OzLady would be familiar with that’un) that has “Letterkenny” available for streaming. I’ve watched just about all of the episodes (I can catch them on my laptop at the library, where there’s unlimited bandwidth) Is “Letterkenny” widely discussed in Canada, the way that “Little Mosque on the Prairie” and “Trailer Park Boys” was? Or is it a niche thing? I watch it with English subtitles on because the alliterative wordplay comes so fast. I lived in Vancouver for four years and I never heard most of the Great White North slang terms the characters use — especially the hockey doofuses. Ferda! But Van City is way different linguistically to the Prairie provinces and the Maritimes, so maybe that’s just my ignorance.
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I never heard of that show but hm.. I do wonder why so many of my readers are Canooks? Maybe because they are a highly intelligent people?
One of these days I will go back and look at my stats, like I used to do every month, to see the spread from different countries.
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File Under; Confirmation Bias
Over at MOA yesterday I read this bit in reference to Ukrainia’s Nazis being unwilling to fight for Nazism which, as readers of my comments will know, is a multi-generational sore subject to this Irish-American:
“The street gangs and hooligans of the fascist Right Sector, who played a major role during the so called Maidan revolution, were not keen to be real soldiers. They put the least experienced mobilized men into the frontline and kept their ideological brethren in the back. Such behavior had been fine under the former Commander in Chief General Zaluzhni who has a well known affinity for the hard right ‘nationalists’ units. But the new Commander in Chief General Syrski needs real soldiers, not amateurish terrorists”.
Which confirms what my father told me about true-Nazis; unless they’re hopelessly lost, they are ALWAYS to be found safely in the rear. Hence, my unasked for advice to the Russian High Command, fight west to east. I definitively note; the goosestepan-Galacians are refusing en masse to redeploy to combat units. I can hear my father laughing.
In other good news related by Colonel [Ret.] Macgregor on Judging-Freedom, Russia’s frontline propaganda seems to be working, Ukrainia’s untermenschen, those conscripts forced to fight for the gutless-goosestepan-Galacians are starting to “subdue” the Gestapo-esque “blocking-units” that force them into suicidal charges. As a result, such conscripted untermenschen will wind up surviving the war because they’re surrendering en masse to the Ruskies rather than die as Galician-cannon-fodder. That’s going to save a lot of lives and those men will be needed to clean-up the effing mess created by the demons of DC and London when this God-forsaken war is done. Hopefully, the Russ will use their POW-internment to teach useful construction trades as well as truthful history lessens, both will be sorely needed in the aftermath of this war, another, in a long, long, long line of Langley-débâcles.
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Likewise, I’ve been happy to see more of the frontline conscripts wise up. Also, glad to see the nationalist formations tossed into the frontline, where their qualities (and lack thereof) can be on full view. That, plus the Rada declaring infinite mobilization until death due us part, is helping the “fighting aged” population wake up.
And they are very angry.
To the point, however: yes, Russian deprogramming efforts appear to have been organized fairly early, at least once it became clear by March 2022 that any ideas of a mass Ukrainian revolt were fantasy. Since then, as I understand, larger and larger numbers of prisoners have declined to be repatriated, and enough have sworn into Russian service to form a unit AGAINST their Banderite former masters.
Yes, presumably these individuals are well-vetted. I suppose we could consider them the core around which a Free Ukraine force can be organized.
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And eventually form the core of a new Ukrainian army, allied with Russia.
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Yalensis, do you have any info about the “commune” that formed the original village of Sacco and Vanzetti? Were the inhabitants who founded the village anarchists or standard-issue communists? There must be some interesting history about this village. I must say that I feel ashamed that there was a village in the USSR named after two Italian-Americans who were murdered by the Massachusetts government a century ago simply for being anarchists and Italian Americans even though they had no relation at all to the murder they were charged with. Why are there no towns named after these two victims of “American justice” in the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakko_i_Vantsetti
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Hi, cc, I don’t really know much about the village or whether the founders were anarchists or communists. They were surely admirers of the Italian anarchists who were unfairly executed in the U.S., that’s about all I know, sorry!
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I did learn that the figures of Sacco/Vanzetti were very popular in the USSR in general. In 1927 a major street in Ekaterinburg was also named after them. As well as streets in dozens of other Soviet cities, including Volgograd and Donetsk!
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It’s perhaps not the first New York around the Black Sea. I’ve brought this up before, but yes, have been just waiting for breathless news articles about how “Russia Bombs New York!” … followed by editor’s correction “(in Ukraine)” half a day later. Just the thing to stir up ignorant Americans.
Anyway. This bit of history fascinates me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_(medieval)
https://stephenliddell.co.uk/2020/07/01/nova-anglia-the-anglo-saxon-refugees-who-built-the-original-new-england-on-the-black-sea/
https://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/05/medieval-new-england-black-sea.html
The second link has perhaps the clearest map of settlements. I wrote and deleted “supposed”, because there’s perhaps more than enough evidence that Anglish expatriates fled William’s conquest and were given the rights to do what they wanted with ex-Roman lands in Crimea and the eastern Black Sea.
If the UK elite really wanted to, they could tout this as some far-fetched land claim to their fascination with Crimea, but I doubt either they or the British populace has the patience for such.
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Wow! that’s really interesting! Even in medieval times, people they did get around and see the world!
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