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The Even Cooler Stuff From [History] Thread

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    cckerberoscckerberos Registered User regular
    Kaputa wrote: »
    I find this visualization of WWII's death counts to be pretty amazing. They use little mans to represent 1000 people each and stack them according to faction, basically.

    But also not a good thing to watch if you want to feel happy about anything for the rest of the day. When I first watched it I could barely deal with watching the USSR's column rise, even remembering it is enough to cause bad feelings.

    It is really impressive. I really wish they hadn't given the Pacific Theater such a cursory glance, however (just over a minute of an 18 minute video). The graphic labelled "Japanese War Crimes" in particular should have been gone over in depth.

    cckerberos.png
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    Captain InertiaCaptain Inertia Registered User regular
    The timing on when that was created is haunting

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    V1mV1m Registered User regular
    Those recruitment strategies made sense in an era when the army's job was basically "highly trained colonial enforcers". It was a good way to get people to join and to informally pre-screen applications. Even now, army regiments often have strong ties to a specific area.

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    Donovan PuppyfuckerDonovan Puppyfucker A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered User regular
    Kaputa wrote: »
    I find this visualization of WWII's death counts to be pretty amazing. They use little mans to represent 1000 people each and stack them according to faction, basically.

    But also not a good thing to watch if you want to feel happy about anything for the rest of the day. When I first watched it I could barely deal with watching the USSR's column rise, even remembering it is enough to cause bad feelings.

    They basically lost an entire generation. Shit was fucked, and I mean TURBOfucked.

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    KadokenKadoken Giving Ends to my Friends and it Feels Stupendous Registered User regular
    Right after losing a generation

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    Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    edited September 2018
    V1m wrote: »
    Those recruitment strategies made sense in an era when the army's job was basically "highly trained colonial enforcers". It was a good way to get people to join and to informally pre-screen applications. Even now, army regiments often have strong ties to a specific area.

    IIRC they basically didn't need a serious recruitment strategy in Britain until WW1. Prior to that it was a small force beating up the locals and a good way to make some money so they basically had everyone they'd need.

    It was only after they threw their incredibly effective BEF into the meat grinder that they had to start getting clever.

    Styrofoam Sammich on
    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
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    SolarSolar Registered User regular
    edited September 2018
    Between the end of the Napoleonic wars and WWI the British Army didn't really engage in proper full total war like the other great powers did on a considerably more regular basis, and was mostly designed to be an expeditionary force with the Royal Navy doing the heavy imperial lifting across the globe and recruited local forces doing most of the provincial work. In the Crimea the numbers were mostly provided by the French, and the British army in that conflict was a bit of a disaster that was forced to modernise (it's when they ended purchasing your commission for example).

    Conversely, the French, Germans, Russians etc had all developed militaries based on the potential need to fight massive European land wars and that's why they mobilised insane proportions of the population so quickly (1 in 8 French men, compared to 1 in 48 British men)

    Solar on
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    Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    Solar wrote: »
    Between the end of the Napoleonic wars and WWI the British Army didn't really engage in proper full total war like the other great powers did, and was mostly designed to be an expeditionary force with the Royal Navy doing the heavy imperial lifting across the globe and recruited local forces doing most of the provincial work. In the Crimea the numbers were mostly provided by the French, and the British army in that conflict was a bit of a disaster that was forced to modernise (it's when they ended purchasing your commission for example).

    They had a massive amount of experience and discipline compared to continental armies though.

    The BEF was serious business, they just lacked the numbers.

    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
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    SolarSolar Registered User regular
    It was, definitely. Played a big part in the Battle of the Marne and were key to the failure of the Schlieffen Plan.

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    Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    There are first hand accounts from fresh troops describing the discipline among the old vets that are pretty interesting. I'll see if I can find them later.

    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
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    BlackDragon480BlackDragon480 Bluster Kerfuffle Master of Windy ImportRegistered User regular
    There are first hand accounts from fresh troops describing the discipline among the old vets that are pretty interesting. I'll see if I can find them later.

    Pretty much any first hand accounts from the trenches are worth perusing/amazing.

    You had individual trenches printing their own newspapers, sending trade requests to quartermasters of other trenches, even enemy ones (British tinned beef being pretty much the gold standard of field booty and/or currency in the German lines), strange superstitions/traditions (like one of the British trenches at the Somme having a cadaver's hand sticking out through a wall, guys heading to the firing line/no man's land would shake it for luck on their way by).

    Existence there was simply bat shit insane.

    No matter where you go...there you are.
    ~ Buckaroo Banzai
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    MayabirdMayabird Pecking at the keyboardRegistered User regular
    Kaputa wrote: »
    I find this visualization of WWII's death counts to be pretty amazing. They use little mans to represent 1000 people each and stack them according to faction, basically.

    But also not a good thing to watch if you want to feel happy about anything for the rest of the day. When I first watched it I could barely deal with watching the USSR's column rise, even remembering it is enough to cause bad feelings.

    They basically lost an entire generation. Shit was fucked, and I mean TURBOfucked.

    We can still see the echoes of that lost generation in Russia's demographics today.

    736px-population_pyramid_of_russia_2009_wikipedia.png

    That's what turbofucked looks like in graph form.

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    NyysjanNyysjan FinlandRegistered User regular
    Mayabird wrote: »
    Kaputa wrote: »
    I find this visualization of WWII's death counts to be pretty amazing. They use little mans to represent 1000 people each and stack them according to faction, basically.

    But also not a good thing to watch if you want to feel happy about anything for the rest of the day. When I first watched it I could barely deal with watching the USSR's column rise, even remembering it is enough to cause bad feelings.

    They basically lost an entire generation. Shit was fucked, and I mean TURBOfucked.

    We can still see the echoes of that lost generation in Russia's demographics today.

    736px-population_pyramid_of_russia_2009_wikipedia.png

    That's what turbofucked looks like in graph form.
    Eh, past 70 i'd totally buy women just living longer.
    Alcoholism alone probably kills a huge percentage of the men.
    Also, only people around 80 and above would have been alive during world war 2, which, again, alcoholism, work related illnesses/accidents, etc...

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    GvzbgulGvzbgul Registered User regular
    Vaguely history related question:

    Can anyone read this?
    vabg5ysl5hq4.jpg

    The name in the Name of Ship column. My great great great grandfather sailed to NZ from London on the Tory in 1839 when he was 23. The named ship is the ship he was on before but I am unable to read it. Alex Robinson maybe? And I'm not sure what the mark in the middle is meant to mean.

    I've checked Lloyd's Register of British and Foreign Shipping for the years 1839 and 1840 but I haven't been able to find a ship that is called ____ Robinson. There was one called Robinson and plenty of people named Robinson.

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    Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    edited September 2018
    Eh, past 70 i'd totally buy women just living longer.
    Alcoholism alone probably kills a huge percentage of the men.
    Also, only people around 80 and above would have been alive during world war 2, which, again, alcoholism, work related illnesses/accidents, etc...

    Yeah there's always more women at that age, but look at around 85.

    Styrofoam Sammich on
    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
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    Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    edited September 2018
    Here's the same chart type for US citizens (pdf).

    Notice the far more gradual slope instead of basically no men being alive.

    Styrofoam Sammich on
    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
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    NyysjanNyysjan FinlandRegistered User regular
    edited September 2018
    Eh, past 70 i'd totally buy women just living longer.
    Alcoholism alone probably kills a huge percentage of the men.
    Also, only people around 80 and above would have been alive during world war 2, which, again, alcoholism, work related illnesses/accidents, etc...

    Yeah there's always more women at that age, but look at around 85.
    Yes, i noticed.
    I'm just pointing out that the age pyramid alone is not enough to show causation, it is completely believable that, without the war, Russia might have ended with a nearly identical age pyramid.
    Looking at the age 70, we see roughly twice as many women as men alive. From there, more and more men die off relative to women.
    Might have been the war, might have been alcoholism, might have been poor working conditions. It's a correlation =/= causation thing.

    The most interesting thing about it, for me, is the amount of women over hundred.

    Nyysjan on
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    Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    edited September 2018
    I mean ok but we know they had something like 8.6 million military dead alone. There isn't any mystery here. Causation is clear. They have fewer men than other major nations over the age of 80 because they all died 60 years ago.

    Styrofoam Sammich on
    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
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    NyysjanNyysjan FinlandRegistered User regular
    edited September 2018
    I mean ok but we know they had something like 8.6 million military dead alone. There isn't any mystery here. Causation is clear. They have fewer men than other major nations over the age of 80 because they all died 60 years ago.
    Well, yes, no mystery, nothing is being shown.
    My point was purely that the messed upness of the Russian age pyramid is not really indicative of the war or its casualty rates.
    Correlation is not causation, the horrible casualities of the war did not necessarily cause the age pyramids messed upness.

    Nyysjan on
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    FiendishrabbitFiendishrabbit Registered User regular
    edited September 2018
    This is what it looked like in 1988.
    cf124.f6.3.gif

    1. Note the Number of children born during the war. This is impacted quite a lot in every country, but it's very extreme in russia. An indication of just how many people were involved in the war effort. There is also a small impact due to WWI.
    2. Note that women were also recruited in the soviet army, however they were generally not drafted outside the prime ages and only volunteers served on the frontlines except as support personnel.
    3. Prime recruiting ages would have been people born 1915-1927 (ie, during the war they would have been 18-30 years old), with the smallest impact on those born 1926-1927 as they would only have been elegible for the last few years of conflict, basicly after the big slaughters such as Stalingrad and Kursk (The Battle of Kursk is a milestone in russian casualty figures. While the number of sick and injured remained high, the "irrecoverable losses" halved after that. During the months of Kursk the Soviet union suffered 800,000 "irrecoverable losses" and another 2 million sick and wounded).
    4. 1932-1933 is the "Great famine", which accounts for the lack of newborns in that year and the population drop in the years surrounding that disaster.

    Fiendishrabbit on
    "The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
    -Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
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    NyysjanNyysjan FinlandRegistered User regular
    What would be of interest is the age pyramid for 1945 (or of that general era).
    Found one for 1950, which shows ages 35 to 40 having almost (but not quite) twice as many women as men alive.
    That's less likely to be just a case of natural mortality among men.

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    FiendishrabbitFiendishrabbit Registered User regular
    Speaking of Soviet union and male mortality. 1923 was a really shitty year to be born if you were a soviet male.
    So how many soviet male children were born in that year? Well, Approximately 3.4 million.

    Even their first year was quite awful, Russian infant mortality at that time was 223/1000, or ~1/4.5 (by comparison, US infant mortality was approx. 80/1000, which was quite a significant drop from 1900 where it was approx. 160/1000), so right of the bat we scratch 800,000 from that number. Then they lived through one of the most turbulent times in russian history. Stalins terror, the great famine, the soviet migrations. By 1941 another 800,000 were dead, most of them to famine but not an insignificant number due to Stalins regime. The children of "enemies of the revolution" were not spared (political opponents, landowners, any number of cultural minorities...or just the unlucky). So, 1941. Approximately 1,8 million males born in 1923 are still alive, so about half. Bam! WWII, and you fuckers, you're 18 and just the wrong age to be the youngest drafts that will serve the entire war. Out of those 1.8 million, only 1.1 million survive the war.

    At the end of WWII, when those young men were 22-23, out of all those mothers who gave birth in 1923 2/3rds had lost their sons.

    "The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
    -Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
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    KadokenKadoken Giving Ends to my Friends and it Feels Stupendous Registered User regular
    I always found it interesting that those drafted into the war that later went to prison were apparently hated by the prison population because they served at all. Like with a mass draft how did that make sense to the gopniki and proto-bratva?

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    Dongs GaloreDongs Galore Registered User regular
    Solar wrote: »
    Between the end of the Napoleonic wars and WWI the British Army didn't really engage in proper full total war like the other great powers did on a considerably more regular basis, and was mostly designed to be an expeditionary force with the Royal Navy doing the heavy imperial lifting across the globe and recruited local forces doing most of the provincial work. In the Crimea the numbers were mostly provided by the French, and the British army in that conflict was a bit of a disaster that was forced to modernise (it's when they ended purchasing your commission for example).

    Conversely, the French, Germans, Russians etc had all developed militaries based on the potential need to fight massive European land wars and that's why they mobilised insane proportions of the population so quickly (1 in 8 French men, compared to 1 in 48 British men)
    While they didn't fight in a major continental war, the British did fight the 2nd Boer War, which alongside the Russo-Japanese was in many respects the closest thing to WW1 which anyone experienced before 1914. The British Army was a also a shitshow at the start of that war in 1899 - arguably a worse shitshow than in Crimea. The reforms which came out of the Boer War made the British Army man-for-man possibly the best trained for modern combat out of all the European forces.
    They were even aware that they needed a larger mobilization army. One of the shocks of 1899-1900 was that the Army rapidly ran short of first-line professional troops, and the reserves were very badly trained yeomary. But it was politically impossible to institute conscription in Britain, so this reform was never implemented and instead they focused on making the standing army as good as possible.

    It is perhaps ironic that the British and Russians were the only great European powers with industrial warfare experience but also the ones least able to implement the lessons they learned.

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    SolarSolar Registered User regular
    Ah yeah the Boer war, point taken.

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    JusticeforPlutoJusticeforPluto Registered User regular
    Russia is WW1 is terrible, just terrible. I can understand why the Austro-Hungarian Empire was terrible, but man was Russia in a bad spot.

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    Kipling217Kipling217 Registered User regular
    Kadoken wrote: »
    I always found it interesting that those drafted into the war that later went to prison were apparently hated by the prison population because they served at all. Like with a mass draft how did that make sense to the gopniki and proto-bratva?

    It was because a lot of criminal prisoners where offered early release if they fought in the war, which in Russian Criminal culture was the equivalent of becoming a snitch. A Russian thief was not supposed to help the authorities at all, even with something as small as ringing a dinner bell while in prison. So a lot of the thieves in law or Vory v Zakone declared anybody that served as "bitches" or Suka. After the war, many Suka where sent back either due to new crimes or plain assholishness of the Soviet authorities.

    Since the Suka where hardened criminals and hardened soldiers, they decided to kill the "pure Vory". The prison authorities look the other way because the Suka had at least served and because every dead prisoner was one less criminal that would be sent back to the street.

    The Bitch wars as they are called, lasted decades in the soviet gulag system.

    The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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    HonkHonk Honk is this poster. Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    Kipling217 wrote: »
    Kadoken wrote: »
    I always found it interesting that those drafted into the war that later went to prison were apparently hated by the prison population because they served at all. Like with a mass draft how did that make sense to the gopniki and proto-bratva?

    It was because a lot of criminal prisoners where offered early release if they fought in the war, which in Russian Criminal culture was the equivalent of becoming a snitch. A Russian thief was not supposed to help the authorities at all, even with something as small as ringing a dinner bell while in prison. So a lot of the thieves in law or Vory v Zakone declared anybody that served as "bitches" or Suka. After the war, many Suka where sent back either due to new crimes or plain assholishness of the Soviet authorities.

    Since the Suka where hardened criminals and hardened soldiers, they decided to kill the "pure Vory". The prison authorities look the other way because the Suka had at least served and because every dead prisoner was one less criminal that would be sent back to the street.

    The Bitch wars as they are called, lasted decades in the soviet gulag system.

    That’s no way to run a criminal justice system!!

    PSN: Honkalot
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    Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    Honk wrote: »
    Kipling217 wrote: »
    Kadoken wrote: »
    I always found it interesting that those drafted into the war that later went to prison were apparently hated by the prison population because they served at all. Like with a mass draft how did that make sense to the gopniki and proto-bratva?

    It was because a lot of criminal prisoners where offered early release if they fought in the war, which in Russian Criminal culture was the equivalent of becoming a snitch. A Russian thief was not supposed to help the authorities at all, even with something as small as ringing a dinner bell while in prison. So a lot of the thieves in law or Vory v Zakone declared anybody that served as "bitches" or Suka. After the war, many Suka where sent back either due to new crimes or plain assholishness of the Soviet authorities.

    Since the Suka where hardened criminals and hardened soldiers, they decided to kill the "pure Vory". The prison authorities look the other way because the Suka had at least served and because every dead prisoner was one less criminal that would be sent back to the street.

    The Bitch wars as they are called, lasted decades in the soviet gulag system.

    That’s no way to run a criminal justice system!!

    You've gotta get yourself a criminal justice system

    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
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    ShortyShorty touching the meat Intergalactic Cool CourtRegistered User regular
    Kipling217 wrote: »
    Kadoken wrote: »
    I always found it interesting that those drafted into the war that later went to prison were apparently hated by the prison population because they served at all. Like with a mass draft how did that make sense to the gopniki and proto-bratva?

    It was because a lot of criminal prisoners where offered early release if they fought in the war, which in Russian Criminal culture was the equivalent of becoming a snitch. A Russian thief was not supposed to help the authorities at all, even with something as small as ringing a dinner bell while in prison. So a lot of the thieves in law or Vory v Zakone declared anybody that served as "bitches" or Suka. After the war, many Suka where sent back either due to new crimes or plain assholishness of the Soviet authorities.

    Since the Suka where hardened criminals and hardened soldiers, they decided to kill the "pure Vory". The prison authorities look the other way because the Suka had at least served and because every dead prisoner was one less criminal that would be sent back to the street.

    The Bitch wars as they are called, lasted decades in the soviet gulag system.

    years ago I had a chance to buy a book on Soviet prison tattoos and I'm still kicking myself for not doing so

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    KadokenKadoken Giving Ends to my Friends and it Feels Stupendous Registered User regular
    After a point why not just kill the prisoners or make summary execution a thing? Especially in the USSR, who would stop you? They’re not going for rehabilitation.

    Note, this line of thinking is specifically for Russian prisons, especially historical ones which in every account I have heard are fuck-awful.

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    Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    Kadoken wrote: »
    After a point why not just kill the prisoners or make summary execution a thing? Especially in the USSR, who would stop you? They’re not going for rehabilitation.

    Note, this line of thinking is specifically for Russian prisons, especially historical ones which in every account I have heard are fuck-awful.

    If you were a ruling power at the time your biggest concern was a coup or rebellion. Mass executions of soldiers is a good way to get the former.

    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
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    TastyfishTastyfish Registered User regular
    edited September 2018
    Gvzbgul wrote: »
    Vaguely history related question:

    Can anyone read this?
    vabg5ysl5hq4.jpg

    The name in the Name of Ship column. My great great great grandfather sailed to NZ from London on the Tory in 1839 when he was 23. The named ship is the ship he was on before but I am unable to read it. Alex Robinson maybe? And I'm not sure what the mark in the middle is meant to mean.

    I've checked Lloyd's Register of British and Foreign Shipping for the years 1839 and 1840 but I haven't been able to find a ship that is called ____ Robinson. There was one called Robinson and plenty of people named Robinson.

    I think that "A" could be a H, so it'd be HMS Robinson or some other local variant from another British territory.

    Tastyfish on
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    FiendishrabbitFiendishrabbit Registered User regular
    Definitely not HMS Robinson. There has never been such a ship. Besides, It definitely says Alex (squiggle) Robinson. Could be a middle name, or could be some sort of registry shorthand. Port Robinson? Nah. The only Port Robinsons active at that time were in Australia and Canada. It could have been a small coastal vessels, vessels under a certain size were not required to register.

    "The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
    -Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
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    Kipling217Kipling217 Registered User regular
    Kadoken wrote: »
    After a point why not just kill the prisoners or make summary execution a thing? Especially in the USSR, who would stop you? They’re not going for rehabilitation.

    Note, this line of thinking is specifically for Russian prisons, especially historical ones which in every account I have heard are fuck-awful.

    If you were a ruling power at the time your biggest concern was a coup or rebellion. Mass executions of soldiers is a good way to get the former.

    Summary executions just makes people resist all the harder. If you know that death is all that awaits you, wouldn't you fight?

    The Gulags worked because while it was in effect a death sentence, it just wasn't a formal death sentence. You could still pardon people, giving their relatives a slim hope of seeing them alive again, or at least an incentive not to rock the boat in case they do get executed. If they where dead, you lost all leverage and only got pissed people left behind.

    Plus prison labor was a thing, Vory may have opposed it, but they where still forced to work, hard labor in the depths of Siberia.

    The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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    FiendishrabbitFiendishrabbit Registered User regular
    Many Gulags during Tsarist and Stalins rule summarily executed anyone caught with Vory tattoos.

    "The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
    -Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
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    grumblethorngrumblethorn Registered User regular
    Hey man that hand dug canal using rocks and ice as cement in the dead of a Siberian winter isn't gonna build itself.

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    FiendishrabbitFiendishrabbit Registered User regular
    @Gvzbgul I would consider another possibility. If this slip is written by a clerk and not your ancestor himself (a distinct possibility given the very neat script) I could imagine this scenario
    Clerk: "Ship previously served?"
    Ancestor: *in a very thick accent* Alex Robertson
    Clerk: Hmmm. *writes down Alex Robinson*, and we're done. Witness sign here.

    Because there was a Alexander Robertson, a 229 ton barque.

    "The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
    -Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
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    BlackDragon480BlackDragon480 Bluster Kerfuffle Master of Windy ImportRegistered User regular
    edited September 2018
    My leatherman wishes it looked that fly.

    BlackDragon480 on
    No matter where you go...there you are.
    ~ Buckaroo Banzai
This discussion has been closed.