Nice little quiz I found on CSMonitor. Answers at end. How’d you do?
If you want to take it online — http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2013/1202/How-much-do-you-know-about-Ukraine-Take-our-quiz/The-Name
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1) The name ‘Ukraine’ comes from what exactly?
A) A three-stringed triangle-shaped instrument that resembles a cross between a mandolin and a guitar
B) A Slavic phrase meaning “on the periphery” or “borderland.”
C) The nickname for the former first baseman of the Boston Red Sox (and Chicago White Sox), Kevin Youkilis.
D) The old Slavonic word meaning “land of black earth.”
2. Ukraine’s revered literary bard (a.k.a. poet of the nation) is:
A) Alexander Pushkin
B) Nikolai Gogol
C) Verka Serduchka
D) Taras Shevchenko
3. An event known as the ‘Holodomor’ is considered pivotal in modern Ukrainian history. What is it?
A) Famine in the early 1930s that killed millions, mainly peasants.
B) The mass protests in 2004 that came to be known as the Orange Revolution
C) The period just after the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s when the country’s economy was in free-fall.
D) The period between Christmas, as celebrated many Ukrainian Catholics, and Christmas, as celebrated by Ukrainian Orthodox believers.
4. What is ‘salo’?
A) An operatic aria usually sung in Ukrainian by a woman
B) A type of beverage, made from honey and herbs and fermented slightly
C) A loud call used by farmers to summon livestock in at the end of the work day
D) A garlicky, fatty food item made typically made from pig fat
5. The current president is Viktor Yanukovych. In his first attempt at the presidency, in 2004, whom did he lose to?
A) Yulia Tymoshenko
B) Nikita Khrushchev
C) Viktor Yushchenko
D) Andrey Shevchenko
6. The 2004 election campaign between Yanukovych and Yushchenko was notable for many reasons. But the event that garnered worldwide headlines was what?
A) The suspicious illness that hospitalized Yushchenko and nearly killed him.
B) The fact that Yanukovych gave most of his campaign speeches in Russian, because his Ukrainian was so poor.
C) The broadcast of a campaign song for Yushchenko that likened Ukraine to the Holy Land.
D) The fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin campaigned for Yanukovych, traveling to Ukraine to personally endorse him.
7. In 988, a Kievan prince named Vladimir adopted Orthodox Christianity as the official religion the Kievan Rus kingdom. In doing so, he considered, and rejected, several other major religions. Which of these were actually his reason for rejecting them?
A) He rejected Judaism because he thought that the sacking of Jerusalem, several centuries earlier, indicated God had abandoned Jews.
B) He rejected Islam because he thought the Islamic ban on alcohol and pork was contrary to local culture.
C) He rejected European (Roman Catholic) Christianity because churches in Germany were too plain compared with Orthodox Christian churches in Constantinople, which at the time had supplanted Rome as the center for Christian thinking.
D) All of the above.
8. In January 2006, a trade dispute erupted between Ukraine and Russia that had major implications for Europe. What was the dispute over?
A) Potatoes
B) Beets
C) Salo
D) Natural gas
9. The 1854 Battle of Balaclava on the Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula that is today part of Ukraine, has been immortalized in what work of art?
A) The painting by Ilya Repin, entitled “The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan of Turkey.”
B) The poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson called “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
C) The orchestral piece known as the 1812 Overture, by composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
D) The statue known as “The Motherland Calls,” by sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich.
10. The Ukrainian capital Kiev was completely destroyed in 1240 by whom?
A) The Teutonic Knights
B) The Sayyid Turks
C) The Don Cossacks
D) The Mongols/Tatars
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Sergii Bielov, 36, from Kiev, took part in the Maidan protests
“I am Ukrainian and both of my parents are Ukrainian too. This is our country.
Crimea is part of Ukraine too and it is not right that Russia should take it or send troops here.
But am I prepared to fight for it? I don’t know.
I feel like this is not a war worth dying for. It is a war of politics. This is not about the people.
When we were protesting in the Maidan, we knew what we were fighting for. It was about corruption and removing the president. There were criminals in government and in one year Ukraine was going to default.
But nothing is worth people’s lives.
It’s really hard for me to go back to the square where people were killed.
It’s not just the people who died either. There were many people injured too. My wife and I have been visiting them in the clinics.
They will struggle for the rest of their lives. I asked them ‘If you could return to the moment before you were hurt, would you do the same again?’ and most of them said there was a high chance they would.
Would I? I don’t know.
More than 100 protesters are believed to have been killed by riot police in Kiev
We did not know then that removing Yanukovych could lead to war. I don’t want to fight in a war. I would be scared of dying.
But if Russian troops started fighting Ukrainian troops and you put a rifle in my hand, then yes I would probably fight, but I wouldn’t want to.
No-one wants war.
have Russian friends and relatives in Syktivkar in Russia. I can’t imagine having to shoot them or them shooting me.
I work in IT programming and before this year I had never taken part in any protests or strikes. The police action was a trigger that opened my eyes to the corruption.
In the beginning the protest was about integration with the EU, but I did not feel very strongly about it.
Then I saw how the police treated people protesting in the square. After that moment it wasn’t about integration, for me it was about the behaviour of our government.
‘Too scared’
In the week I went to work as normal and I obeyed the law. At the weekend I went down to the Maidan and joined the protests for about nine days in total.
I didn’t have a placard or any weapons, I just stood there with the others. It was enough for me just to be there and to feel like I was having my say.
To my shame I wasn’t there at the critical moment at the end of February. I was too scared.
I had no idea how it was going to end. I suppose I thought the protests would continue for a while and then people would grow tired and would eventually go home. I did not believe anything would change, but I felt that I had to do something, even though I didn’t know exactly what.
When I heard that Yanukovych had left Kiev, I didn’t feel anything for him. I didn’t care about him or his country house, I was only thinking about the people who had died. He is an ex-politician and not worth the blood of anyone.
I was standing in the place where those people died and I was crying.
After some time had passed I was glad that he had left.
I don’t believe in the new government either. They are from the same groups, they have the same politics, they move from one cabinet to another. The only difference is the flag colour has changed. But they are still the elites.
‘Chance to avoid war’
It was a big shock for them to see what people can do, to rise up against a president. I hope they will remember this in future.
I hope too the rest of the world makes Putin remove his troops. I don’t want the World to provide their own troops though, that would cause World War Three.
I just hope they can talk him down.
For now, although there are many Russian troops, no-one is shooting in Crimea. Yes, they are provoking, but no-one is dying.
There is still a chance we can avoid war. If we do not, we will be the second Georgia or Chechnya and many people will lose their lives. That could be me.
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A CONTRAST IN STYLES
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QUIZ ANSWERS
| Your score (Stucky) |
| 8 Correct 2 WrongYou answered 8 of 10 questions correctly for a total score of 80%.Average Reader Score 69% |
1)- B —- The Ukrainian language shares common grammatical ties to Russian and other Slavic languages. The name “Ukraine” has roots in old Slavonic, a predecessor language for Russian and Ukrainian, in the phrase “oukraina” which roughly translates “on the periphery” or “borderland” or “frontier,” as in Ukraine is on the periphery or frontier of Russia.
2)- B —– Though the 19th century writer Nikolai Gogol was indeed born in Ukraine and is far better known worldwide, Taras Shevchenko is considered the national poet of Ukraine. A collection of his poetry called “Kobzar,” written in the first half of the 19th century, is considered the foundation for the Ukrainian language, and Ukrainian schoolchildren have long been drilled in reciting his verses. That said, many younger Ukrainians can probably just as easily cite the lyrics to the songs sung by the cross-dressing, androgynous pop star, Verka Serduchka, who came in second place in the 2007 Eurovision contest.
3)- A —Holodomor translates as “extermination by hunger,” the name used by many Ukrainians to describe the famine in 1932-33 that hit the Soviet Union as a whole, but was especially destructive in Ukraine. Various estimates place the death toll at between 2.5 million and 7 million in Ukraine alone. Most historians agree that the famine was due largely to ill-conceived Soviet agriculture policies under Stalin. Nationalists have long asserted those policies were specifically designed to affect Ukrainians, though that assertion has never been definitively proven
4)- D — Resembling something like fatback, or chewy bacon fat, or even hardened lard, salo is considered a delicacy that is central to Ukrainian culinary identity. Sliced thin and placed on rye bread, salo can serve as bar snack or simply a garnish for a big bowl of borscht (which some Ukrainians also claim as their own, much to Russians’ ire).
5)- C— In the 2004 vote, Mr. Yanukovych, who hails from Russian-speaking districts of eastern Ukraine, faced off against Viktor Yushchenko, a former central bank chairman and prime minister. Yanukovych was seen as being much more willing to do Russia’s bidding, but the disputed outcome of the vote in October of that year, brought tens of thousands of Mr. Yushchenko’s supporters into the streets of Kiev in what came to be known as the Orange Revolution. Ultimately, Yushchenko defeated Yanukovych in a court-ordered run-off vote. Yushchenko later proved to a huge disappointment for Ukrainians, and viewed as an feckless, uncharismatic leader, he garnered a paltry number of votes in 2010.
6)- A — The suspicious illness that hospitalized Yushchenko and nearly killed him.
7)- D — Vladimir’s envoys, who traveled widely and met with representatives of these religions, were overwhelmed by the architecture of Constantinople (the city today is known as Istanbul), as well as the ornate liturgy of Orthodox rites. Much of this account comes from Nestor, a Christian monk who labored in Kiev’s famed Monastery of the Caves, and wrote the “Primary Chronicle,” an essential account of the earliest centuries of the Rus empire. According to Nestor, Vladimir also saw benefits in adopting Christianity for political purposes, and after converting, he married the sister of the Byzantine emperor Basil II.
8)- D — Ukraine’s vast network of gas pipelines are a relic of the Soviet industrial planning, to channel Soviet gas to Europe. That continues to be the case, giving Ukraine substantial bargaining power with Russia when it comes to lucrative gas sales to Europe. The 2006 spat was prompted by, among other things, disputes over transit prices and the price Ukraine pays for Russian gas for its own needs. The result was Russia shut off gas to Ukraine, leaving it and some European countries cold and dark in the middle of the winter. The cutoff served as a major wakeup call for Russia, which has built one pipeline, Nord Stream, to circumvent Ukraine and ship gas directly to Germany. It also spooked the European Union which has sought to diversify its gas imports, an effort that continued with only sputtering success.
9)- B — The Crimean War of 1853-56 pitted the Russian armies of Catherine The Great, against an alliance made up of France, Britain, the Ottomans and Sardinia. In 1854, a unit of British light cavalry was ordered, mistakenly, to stage a frontal attack on a Russian artillery battery and was decimated. The British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was inspired by accounts of the massacre to write “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
10)- D — The Mongol armies of Genghis Khan and his successors were arguably the greatest military force the world had seen, sweeping out of the grassy steppes of Central Asia and western China to conquer cities and kingdoms across eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and elsewhere. The splintered tiny principalities along the Volga, Don, Dniepr, and other rivers bore the brunt of the Mongol invasions. After conquering Moscow, Vladimir-Suzdal, and other principalities, forces under the Mongol general Batu Khan in November 1240 overran Kiev, plundering the city and massacring most of its inhabitants. The victory served as a stepping stone to the invasion of Central Europe.
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Minute by minute Live Updates here;
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/ukraine-crisis-live-updates-after-3204804
