There were some nice engravings and woodblocks done for Tale of Genji and some shinto myths pre-Dutch contact
As for the first weebs, after said Dutch trade opening, parts of daishos and some small bits of samurai armor start showing up in Flemish still lifes in the early 17th century.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
Folks back then would have only had locally-available drawings and no photos to reference. All drawing had to be inspired by either the real world things they could see or the fantastical things they heard about from the rare travelers who came thru the mostly-closed-off village they lived in their whole lives.
Which might have been better for imagination, like “paint a new color”
Yeah, one of the things we are not really equipped to imagine/understand these days is the sheer magnitude of the difference of the size of the reference pool we have access to compared to people whose world was largely defined by walking distance.
The profile pictures on the previous page of this thread alone are all over the place stylistically!
+1
PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
Related to the topic of stuff artists hadn't seen themselves: this comes up a lot in Japanese art with tigers. They're a popular motif in East Asian art and mythology, but there weren't actually any tigers in Japan for artists to draw. Even though they couldn't see a live tiger in person, tiger skins were regularly imported to Japan so they could draw the fur and patterning of tigers pretty well usually. The skins looked like this:
But the skins aren't great at showing what the face is really shaped like, and so the Japanese artists had to make educated guesses based off of the look of housecats, which they did have in Japan. ... Except that house cats have much flatter faces than tigers and more prominent eyes, so we end up with this style of drawing tigers where everything else is pretty right on, and then the face is like:
But also there's a memetic quality to those depictions too, where that just becomes How You Draw a Tiger. Even when later Japanese artists could go to a zoo and see a real tiger, lots of art still depicted those flat-faced, large-eyed cats, because it had become a stylistic choice that people liked, separate from the actual depiction of a real animal at all.
Which kinda goes back to the other discussion about "realistic" art. More photo-realistic art isn't inherently better, and art history has most definitely not been a march from less to more realism.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
+11
DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
like the heart being shaped like a butt raised proudly to the sky instead of a muscle-fist with tubes
0
PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
Wasn't ye olde Jesus's image literally based on some Pope's relative and that's why we have White Jesus in art from that period?
There's a decent amount of circumstantial evidence that Cesare Borgia was said model, though there was no official declaration of such in either the Vatican archives or any thing like Vesare's lives of the great artists etc. His dad Alexander VI/Rodrigo Borgia did commission some religious art/motifs using Cesare as the subject, but again, nothing concrete in terms of contracts or hard verification. Here's a known example of a portrait in profile done during his lifetime:
BlackDragon480 on
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
Sick bellowy clown clothes tho. Look at that sleeve, ruffles like whoa!
+3
Indie Winterdie KräheRudi Hurzlmeier (German, b. 1952)Registered Userregular
edited January 21
I don't think nepotism is necessarily the only reason. plenty of medieval illustrations depicted judean scenes using medieval fashion and architecture because a) those were the references they had but also b) these illustrations were supposed to convey allegories and lessons to the non-learnéd, making it more relatable to their daily lives goes a long way into ensuring clarity instead of having a 13th century Bordeaux peasant trying to figure out what the fuck is a toga - so a jesus what looks like he could be from your village makes The Savior of Mankind more appealing
One of the sort of obvious questions with like Tokugawa-era art is basically: why don't they know how to draw faces? It's feels sort of odd looking at a lot of these pieces - amazing clothes, amazing use of color and landscapes and everything, and then it's these odd elongated faces with minimal features:
There's not really a neat and clean explanation for why they did it that way, except that it was a stylistic evolution, typically for portraying samurai-class characters of beauty. There's very specific (but unofficial) rules about how faces are drawn, kinda echoing how the stage makeup of kabuki is put on - women have very white skin and very small mouths, attractive young men also have small mouths and a distinct not-quite-properly-masculine haircut, older men have wide mouths and the full samurai hairdo, sometimes with some extra makeup around the eyes if they're doing something full-on kabuki dramatic. It's specific enough that historians can look at woodcuttings of a bunch of folks in robes and identify ages and classes of the folks pictured just based on the do and the mouth. Simple, clean facial designs are just seen as a positive thing, even as the rest of the body and the world around it is often drawn pretty detailed. There's just a general artistic tendency to de-emphasize the face in art: people are usually drawn as more generalized ideals of (beauty, rage, whatever), you're not intended to be recognizing specific figures - or if you are, it's done through cultural cues like their clothing, age, and maybe small iconic changes from the typical blank face.
(the style also results in a weird conundrum in japanese woodcut pornography - dudes are drawn with huge dicks and women and attractive men with small mouths, soo for as much other crazy sex stuff that gets drawn, one thing we basically NEVER see is fellatio. Cunnilingus is fine, but they just can't fit those huge schlongs in those tiny mouths )
Aaanyway that was just one school of thought on drawing faces, and depending on the type of art they were drawing artists would change up their style. Hokusai in particular is noted for his sorta proto-cartoony drawing style in some of his more comic drawings:
Or the way Hiroshige draws faces in a lot of his postcards feels very comic book-y:
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
+10
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
I don't think nepotism is necessarily the only reason. plenty of medieval illustrations depicted judean scenes using medieval fashion and architecture because a) those were the references they had but also b) these illustrations were supposed to convey allegories and lessons to the non-learnéd, making it more relatable to their daily lives goes a long way into ensuring clarity instead of having a 13th century Bordeaux peasant trying to figure out what the fuck is a toga - so a jesus what looks like he could be from your village makes The Savior of Mankind more appealing
Jesus was a nepo baby to begin with. Like, he put the work in for sure, but you can't tell me a few miracles and a deeply uneven parable game would have taken him as far as it did if his dad wasn't the Lord God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.
One of the sort of obvious questions with like Tokugawa-era art is basically: why don't they know how to draw faces? It's feels sort of odd looking at a lot of these pieces - amazing clothes, amazing use of color and landscapes and everything, and then it's these odd elongated faces with minimal features:
There's not really a neat and clean explanation for why they did it that way, except that it was a stylistic evolution, typically for portraying samurai-class characters of beauty. There's very specific (but unofficial) rules about how faces are drawn, kinda echoing how the stage makeup of kabuki is put on - women have very white skin and very small mouths, attractive young men also have small mouths and a distinct not-quite-properly-masculine haircut, older men have wide mouths and the full samurai hairdo, sometimes with some extra makeup around the eyes if they're doing something full-on kabuki dramatic. It's specific enough that historians can look at woodcuttings of a bunch of folks in robes and identify ages and classes of the folks pictured just based on the do and the mouth. Simple, clean facial designs are just seen as a positive thing, even as the rest of the body and the world around it is often drawn pretty detailed. There's just a general artistic tendency to de-emphasize the face in art: people are usually drawn as more generalized ideals of (beauty, rage, whatever), you're not intended to be recognizing specific figures - or if you are, it's done through cultural cues like their clothing, age, and maybe small iconic changes from the typical blank face.
(the style also results in a weird conundrum in japanese woodcut pornography - dudes are drawn with huge dicks and women and attractive men with small mouths, soo for as much other crazy sex stuff that gets drawn, one thing we basically NEVER see is fellatio. Cunnilingus is fine, but they just can't fit those huge schlongs in those tiny mouths )
Aaanyway that was just one school of thought on drawing faces, and depending on the type of art they were drawing artists would change up their style. Hokusai in particular is noted for his sorta proto-cartoony drawing style in some of his more comic drawings:
Or the way Hiroshige draws faces in a lot of his postcards feels very comic book-y:
the very bottom right corner portrait in the collection of portraits is just japanese bill from king of the hill
+2
Indie Winterdie KräheRudi Hurzlmeier (German, b. 1952)Registered Userregular
I don't think nepotism is necessarily the only reason. plenty of medieval illustrations depicted judean scenes using medieval fashion and architecture because a) those were the references they had but also b) these illustrations were supposed to convey allegories and lessons to the non-learnéd, making it more relatable to their daily lives goes a long way into ensuring clarity instead of having a 13th century Bordeaux peasant trying to figure out what the fuck is a toga - so a jesus what looks like he could be from your village makes The Savior of Mankind more appealing
Jesus was a nepo baby to begin with. Like, he put the work in for sure, but you can't tell me a few miracles and a deeply uneven parable game would have taken him as far as it did if his dad wasn't the Lord God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.
You also stand out a lot more than the average person when you're busy sticking your thumb in the eye of the local religious leaders on purpose repeatedly
Madican on
0
Indie Winterdie KräheRudi Hurzlmeier (German, b. 1952)Registered Userregular
Random question marginally informed by current events: A lot of people blame Gorbachev for the collapse of the Soviet Union, that his reforms unleashed forces that tore the country apart. How true is that, or how inevitable were those forces? Did he just let go of the ears of the wolf, or did he kick the otherwise uninvolved wolf in the nuts?
Random question marginally informed by current events: A lot of people blame Gorbachev for the collapse of the Soviet Union, that his reforms unleashed forces that tore the country apart. How true is that, or how inevitable were those forces? Did he just let go of the ears of the wolf, or did he kick the otherwise uninvolved wolf in the nuts?
It depends ... heavily on who you ask and what sources you're looking at. Personally I don't think he broke the USSR, I think Stalin poisoned things to a point it had no choice but to fail sooner or later. Gorbachov tried to salvage, fix, and improve things; but by the time he was in power it was probably too late to actually fix and salvage things
Random question marginally informed by current events: A lot of people blame Gorbachev for the collapse of the Soviet Union, that his reforms unleashed forces that tore the country apart. How true is that, or how inevitable were those forces? Did he just let go of the ears of the wolf, or did he kick the otherwise uninvolved wolf in the nuts?
It depends ... heavily on who you ask and what sources you're looking at. Personally I don't think he broke the USSR, I think Stalin poisoned things to a point it had no choice but to fail sooner or later. Gorbachov tried to salvage, fix, and improve things; but by the time he was in power it was probably too late to actually fix and salvage things
Gorbachev basically let the steam out of an overheated pressure-cooker in a controlled fashion rather than tightening the lid
+8
BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
Random question marginally informed by current events: A lot of people blame Gorbachev for the collapse of the Soviet Union, that his reforms unleashed forces that tore the country apart. How true is that, or how inevitable were those forces? Did he just let go of the ears of the wolf, or did he kick the otherwise uninvolved wolf in the nuts?
It depends ... heavily on who you ask and what sources you're looking at. Personally I don't think he broke the USSR, I think Stalin poisoned things to a point it had no choice but to fail sooner or later. Gorbachov tried to salvage, fix, and improve things; but by the time he was in power it was probably too late to actually fix and salvage things
Gorbachev basically let the steam out of an overheated pressure-cooker in a controlled fashion rather than tightening the lid
And at the end all that was left was a concentrated cabbage fart the likes of which GAWD has never seen, and said fetid miasma was wafting from the Croesus level hubris grift that had become the lynch pin of their government, and the halitosis of Yeltsin that was equal to the song that ends rhe world...
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
+1
Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
Random question marginally informed by current events: A lot of people blame Gorbachev for the collapse of the Soviet Union, that his reforms unleashed forces that tore the country apart. How true is that, or how inevitable were those forces? Did he just let go of the ears of the wolf, or did he kick the otherwise uninvolved wolf in the nuts?
From memory the Soviet Union was from it's inception a colonial system which looted the periphery in order to prop up the imperial core (Moscow, Leningrad and the urbanized areas of western Russia). Perestroika was an attempt to move beyond that system to stimulate the economy out of stagnation by loosening the reins on the command economy a little bit. However, as soon as the reins were loosened even a little bit the periphery bolted for freedom.
If Gorbachev had tightened his grip instead the USSR may have trudged on for a little bit longer than it did, but the end would have come from violent revolt and revolution instead.
Remember that the guys Gorbachev took over from were, in reverse order:
Chernenko, who got his start in the party as the head of Moldavian propaganda in 1948 and was a loyal member of the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia (see below)
Andropov, who was put on the Central Committee in 1951 and was the ambassador to Hungary as of 1954…his nickname is The Butcher of Budapest…he was the head of the KGB as of 1967 and advocated for extreme force against the Prague Spring
Brezhnev, who gleefully helped identify people to be fed to Stalin’s purges and built up a loyal cadre of supporters called the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia, who he appointed to positions while Premier, leading to a period of major stagnation and corruption…put on the Central Committee by Stalin
Kruschev, who stunned everyone by denouncing Stalin but was incredibly mercurial leading to the other countries in the Warsaw Pact to avoid going too far with de-Stalinization for fear of angering Kruschev and getting Hungary’d…he was the first of our list of assholes here who started ascending in the party while Lenin was still alive
Then Uncle Joe himself (discounting Beria and the other 2 guys Kruschev worked with before turning on them)
Basically everyone until Gorbachev was part of the Central Committee during Stalin’s premiership and had that taint. Gorbachev basically only became Premier because they ran out of Stalin’s contemporaries because they were all so fucking old.
That being said, I actually think the paranoia and poison pill originated with Lenin though- the Bolsheviks were consumed with revolution and orthodoxy (lol, constantly shifting) and ended up killing way more leftists than bourgeoisie (with rural folks/peasants being the most numerous of their victims and then maybe they killed more nazis than leftists?) because they needed to have an iron grip on power to prove that they were the only true keepers of Marxism (then Lenin-Marxism) and thus always justified in whatever they did (a feedback loop). This is why they were, at times, just as likely to start nuking Mao as the US thru the 60s- Mao offered a different take on what socialist revolution meant and they couldn’t abide that.
Up until the actual Bolshevik takeover, Lenin et al were only ever successful at making enemies out of former friends, and because the actual revolution occurred with a tiny number of people in just 1 city of a giant, diverse empire, and because the resulting civil war drew in half-hearted attempts by the UK and US to help the White Army, Lenin and friends were rightfully paranoid about their grip on power.
The initial plans for Russia, for the like 5 minutes before being scrapped because “we’re in a civil war, please pardon my authoritarianism,” were pretty rad, though
Of course the way Stalin orchestrated taking over after Lenin, who tried to tell everyone what a bad asshole who shouldn’t succeed him Stalin was, just turbocharged the feedback loop of paranoia and cult of personality.
Then the collectivization and dekulakization and Holodomor and deal with the Nazis and….
Captain Inertia on
+3
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
It is also a great example of what the Crusades actually were instead of the Hollywood version we get- the Pope just kept demanding different nobles raise an army to fuck up a different flavor of Christians that sprang up around crazy ideas including trying to get bishops to stop fucking everything that moved
This also led to the formation of the Dominicans and Inquisition
+2
PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
there were lots of crusades
the holy lands crusades were just the biggest
+3
Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
I think Gorbachev had no real choice but to enact reforms, either he would have or someone else would have, and I don't think he individually had the power to prevent the transformation of Russia in the 90s into what it became
I also think that the forces that caused the dissolution of the USSR were different depending on the place. There was no question of Latvian independence, but it was rather different for Chechnya and Dagestan for example. The use of regional demands as a political vehicle in Moscow is well documented and analysed, and the complex interrelation between Moscow and the peripheries was not (and is not) as simple as a basic imperial resource extraction model, that's far too generic.
Posts
So maybe manga would work?
No. It was painted in 1814 and blood wasn't discovered by Dr. James Blundell until 1818. Proto-anime at best.
You mean blood transfusion, right? Because I think we figured out blood existed prior to 1814.
*edit* Wow, that reads as a lot more "um actually" than I intended. Sorry about that.
There were some nice engravings and woodblocks done for Tale of Genji and some shinto myths pre-Dutch contact
As for the first weebs, after said Dutch trade opening, parts of daishos and some small bits of samurai armor start showing up in Flemish still lifes in the early 17th century.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Yeah, one of the things we are not really equipped to imagine/understand these days is the sheer magnitude of the difference of the size of the reference pool we have access to compared to people whose world was largely defined by walking distance.
The profile pictures on the previous page of this thread alone are all over the place stylistically!
Anime is blood
But the skins aren't great at showing what the face is really shaped like, and so the Japanese artists had to make educated guesses based off of the look of housecats, which they did have in Japan. ... Except that house cats have much flatter faces than tigers and more prominent eyes, so we end up with this style of drawing tigers where everything else is pretty right on, and then the face is like:
But also there's a memetic quality to those depictions too, where that just becomes How You Draw a Tiger. Even when later Japanese artists could go to a zoo and see a real tiger, lots of art still depicted those flat-faced, large-eyed cats, because it had become a stylistic choice that people liked, separate from the actual depiction of a real animal at all.
Which kinda goes back to the other discussion about "realistic" art. More photo-realistic art isn't inherently better, and art history has most definitely not been a march from less to more realism.
the heart depiction likely comes from silphium: which was used basically as a panacea and important culinary object, but also as an aphrodisiac
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
the seed or fruit looked like this
There's a decent amount of circumstantial evidence that Cesare Borgia was said model, though there was no official declaration of such in either the Vatican archives or any thing like Vesare's lives of the great artists etc. His dad Alexander VI/Rodrigo Borgia did commission some religious art/motifs using Cesare as the subject, but again, nothing concrete in terms of contracts or hard verification. Here's a known example of a portrait in profile done during his lifetime:
~ Buckaroo Banzai
3034-4093-8537 on Switch
One of the sort of obvious questions with like Tokugawa-era art is basically: why don't they know how to draw faces? It's feels sort of odd looking at a lot of these pieces - amazing clothes, amazing use of color and landscapes and everything, and then it's these odd elongated faces with minimal features:
There's not really a neat and clean explanation for why they did it that way, except that it was a stylistic evolution, typically for portraying samurai-class characters of beauty. There's very specific (but unofficial) rules about how faces are drawn, kinda echoing how the stage makeup of kabuki is put on - women have very white skin and very small mouths, attractive young men also have small mouths and a distinct not-quite-properly-masculine haircut, older men have wide mouths and the full samurai hairdo, sometimes with some extra makeup around the eyes if they're doing something full-on kabuki dramatic. It's specific enough that historians can look at woodcuttings of a bunch of folks in robes and identify ages and classes of the folks pictured just based on the do and the mouth. Simple, clean facial designs are just seen as a positive thing, even as the rest of the body and the world around it is often drawn pretty detailed. There's just a general artistic tendency to de-emphasize the face in art: people are usually drawn as more generalized ideals of (beauty, rage, whatever), you're not intended to be recognizing specific figures - or if you are, it's done through cultural cues like their clothing, age, and maybe small iconic changes from the typical blank face.
(the style also results in a weird conundrum in japanese woodcut pornography - dudes are drawn with huge dicks and women and attractive men with small mouths, soo for as much other crazy sex stuff that gets drawn, one thing we basically NEVER see is fellatio. Cunnilingus is fine, but they just can't fit those huge schlongs in those tiny mouths
Aaanyway that was just one school of thought on drawing faces, and depending on the type of art they were drawing artists would change up their style. Hokusai in particular is noted for his sorta proto-cartoony drawing style in some of his more comic drawings:
Or the way Hiroshige draws faces in a lot of his postcards feels very comic book-y:
Jesus was a nepo baby to begin with. Like, he put the work in for sure, but you can't tell me a few miracles and a deeply uneven parable game would have taken him as far as it did if his dad wasn't the Lord God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.
the very bottom right corner portrait in the collection of portraits is just japanese bill from king of the hill
3034-4093-8537 on Switch
You also stand out a lot more than the average person when you're busy sticking your thumb in the eye of the local religious leaders on purpose repeatedly
3034-4093-8537 on Switch
3034-4093-8537 on Switch
It got French'd
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
It depends ... heavily on who you ask and what sources you're looking at. Personally I don't think he broke the USSR, I think Stalin poisoned things to a point it had no choice but to fail sooner or later. Gorbachov tried to salvage, fix, and improve things; but by the time he was in power it was probably too late to actually fix and salvage things
Gorbachev basically let the steam out of an overheated pressure-cooker in a controlled fashion rather than tightening the lid
And at the end all that was left was a concentrated cabbage fart the likes of which GAWD has never seen, and said fetid miasma was wafting from the Croesus level hubris grift that had become the lynch pin of their government, and the halitosis of Yeltsin that was equal to the song that ends rhe world...
~ Buckaroo Banzai
From memory the Soviet Union was from it's inception a colonial system which looted the periphery in order to prop up the imperial core (Moscow, Leningrad and the urbanized areas of western Russia). Perestroika was an attempt to move beyond that system to stimulate the economy out of stagnation by loosening the reins on the command economy a little bit. However, as soon as the reins were loosened even a little bit the periphery bolted for freedom.
If Gorbachev had tightened his grip instead the USSR may have trudged on for a little bit longer than it did, but the end would have come from violent revolt and revolution instead.
Well that explains this
Chernenko, who got his start in the party as the head of Moldavian propaganda in 1948 and was a loyal member of the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia (see below)
Andropov, who was put on the Central Committee in 1951 and was the ambassador to Hungary as of 1954…his nickname is The Butcher of Budapest…he was the head of the KGB as of 1967 and advocated for extreme force against the Prague Spring
Brezhnev, who gleefully helped identify people to be fed to Stalin’s purges and built up a loyal cadre of supporters called the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia, who he appointed to positions while Premier, leading to a period of major stagnation and corruption…put on the Central Committee by Stalin
Kruschev, who stunned everyone by denouncing Stalin but was incredibly mercurial leading to the other countries in the Warsaw Pact to avoid going too far with de-Stalinization for fear of angering Kruschev and getting Hungary’d…he was the first of our list of assholes here who started ascending in the party while Lenin was still alive
Then Uncle Joe himself (discounting Beria and the other 2 guys Kruschev worked with before turning on them)
Basically everyone until Gorbachev was part of the Central Committee during Stalin’s premiership and had that taint. Gorbachev basically only became Premier because they ran out of Stalin’s contemporaries because they were all so fucking old.
That being said, I actually think the paranoia and poison pill originated with Lenin though- the Bolsheviks were consumed with revolution and orthodoxy (lol, constantly shifting) and ended up killing way more leftists than bourgeoisie (with rural folks/peasants being the most numerous of their victims and then maybe they killed more nazis than leftists?) because they needed to have an iron grip on power to prove that they were the only true keepers of Marxism (then Lenin-Marxism) and thus always justified in whatever they did (a feedback loop). This is why they were, at times, just as likely to start nuking Mao as the US thru the 60s- Mao offered a different take on what socialist revolution meant and they couldn’t abide that.
Up until the actual Bolshevik takeover, Lenin et al were only ever successful at making enemies out of former friends, and because the actual revolution occurred with a tiny number of people in just 1 city of a giant, diverse empire, and because the resulting civil war drew in half-hearted attempts by the UK and US to help the White Army, Lenin and friends were rightfully paranoid about their grip on power.
The initial plans for Russia, for the like 5 minutes before being scrapped because “we’re in a civil war, please pardon my authoritarianism,” were pretty rad, though
Of course the way Stalin orchestrated taking over after Lenin, who tried to tell everyone what a bad asshole who shouldn’t succeed him Stalin was, just turbocharged the feedback loop of paranoia and cult of personality.
Then the collectivization and dekulakization and Holodomor and deal with the Nazis and….
As I recall, that campaign is the originator of "kill them all and let God sort them out"
This also led to the formation of the Dominicans and Inquisition
the holy lands crusades were just the biggest
There were so many and so varied it's actually basically impossible to get any two historians to agree how many there were.
I also think that the forces that caused the dissolution of the USSR were different depending on the place. There was no question of Latvian independence, but it was rather different for Chechnya and Dagestan for example. The use of regional demands as a political vehicle in Moscow is well documented and analysed, and the complex interrelation between Moscow and the peripheries was not (and is not) as simple as a basic imperial resource extraction model, that's far too generic.