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Smalensk

Dear User:Ghirlandajo, As you have probably noticed, in the Misplaced Pages for cities having been under different rules or just having different names in different languages due to their being close to state borders all possible names are given. For example, you can find Russian equivalents of the names of Riga, Minsk, Kyiv and Tallinn. There are German names given for Strasbourg, Gdansk and even Kaliningrad. Please stop deleting the Belarusian name Смаленск from this article.--Czalex 19:19, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Dear User:Czalex, you should leave your ridiculous nationalism in the Belarusian wiki. Your naive attempts to "belarusianize" Smolensk will not be accepted in this international project:

1. The so-called Belarusian is not spoken anywhere within hundreds of kilometers from Smolensk, and you know that. The state language of Belarus is Russian. You may provide a Chinese spelling if you like, but this data will be deleted as absolutely irrelevant.

2. The Russian and Belarusian pronunciation of the city name seems to be identical: Smalensk. That the Russian spelling follows more closely the ancient East Slavic norm and the Belarusian strays from that norm to demonstrate its questionable identity doesn't matter that much.

3. Stop flooding the article with factual inaccuracies to the effect that Smolensk used to be a part of Belarus in 1919, which is simply not true. I don't care which nationalistic leaflet provided you with the crap you'd like to insert in the article, but anyway don't forget to cite your sources. --Ghirlandajo 19:41, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Medieval population

Of course, the number of 200.000 for Smolensk's population around 1400 is spurious, to say the least! Eevn Moscow did not reach this number before the late 18th century. And around 1400 not even Paris or Venice had 200.000 inhabitants.

Probably you are right, but I don't like your idea that Western European cities were necessarily larger than the Eastern ones. Judging by the sheer size of urban area, Sarai was the largest city of Europe in the 14th century. --Ghirlandajo 14:00, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Of course, I would not deny that some early Russian towns were among the largest of Europe, like Novgorod Veliki, with 30.000- 50.000, or 12th century Kiëv with almost 50.000.

I would not exclude the possibility that Smolensk around 1400 would have been in the same order of magnitude, but I find it unlikely that it would be much more. Lignomontanus 12:27, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Smolensk was the largest city of Lithuania-Poland which was the largest state in Europe at that time. But Novgorod was larger than that, and larger than medieval Paris, for that matter. They say that modern Novgorod occupies smaller area than the medieval one. --Ghirlandajo 15:06, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

On one of my trips to Russia, my guide told me in Yaroslav that it was the second large city in Russia in the 17th century (after Moscow, of course). When I asked her how many inhabitants the town had at that time, she replied me "around 30.000". That would be a size I would find believable for Smolensk around 1400. Lignomontanus 12:27, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Yes, Yaroslavl was the 2nd largest city of 17th-century Russia, and the territory of its central part hasn't expanded since then, although the current population is 620,000. --Ghirlandajo 15:06, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

It is all based on a website by a somewhat biased amator local historian, written in rather bad English. Should[REDACTED] be an instrument in spreading this MYTH? (It is also epidemiously infecting Wiki's in other languages).

Could a reliable historian expert be found to give us more reliable information about the mediaval population of Smolensk???

Lignomontanus, 31.08.2005

I took the liberty of changing the very unlikely "the population of 200,000" into "a populatiom of several tenths of thousands of inhabitants", which - being somewhat elastic - has a good chance of being true.

Lignomontanus 12:59, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

minor mistakes in english plus some historical inaccuracies

I don't really feel like editing this page myself at this moment but, in the first paragrpah, river names always take THE so it out to be the Smolnya river. yet I don't really know where you got info about this river because to the best of my knowledge no such river exists or ever existed either in Smolensk or anywhere near it. The tar version seems to be the accepted one, since Smolensk was a layover poitn of sorts for boats traveling from the Baltic down to the Black sea, the famous route from the Varyags to the Greeks. They sailed up the western Dvina as far as they could then they pulled thier boats out onto the ground and dragged them along to the upper Dnieper. Smolensk was where they supposedly mended any leaks and small holes that mught have appeared in their boats from being dragged on the ground and they used tar to do that. Thus the origin of the name. I'll leave it at your descretion whether or not to include this info in your article, Ghirlandajo. You somehow fail to mention that for the very first time Smolenks is mentioned in a Novgorod chronicle depicting a military tour by a Novgorod duke down to Csargrad, which was what they called Constantinople back then. In 863 they approached Smolensk but decided against messing with the city on account of it being big and with a lot of people, they decided not to waste time on it. Why this date is significant is because 863 is the year that's officially used by the city authorities to calculate the city's age. As for Oleg, you write in your article that he captured Smolensk, but it isn't true technically, because no force was used, Oleg sort of took Smolensk in passing, on his way to Kiev where he then proceeded to seize the throne and later united Novgorod and Kiev into what was later to become known as Kievan Rus. At Smolensk he simply set camp next to the city and waited until representatives of the people of Smolensk pledged loyalty to Novgorod. The word capture usually implies use of force, Oleg didn't have to use force in Smolensk. Mongols - even though the city was never destoryed by the mongols it was taxed by them until it became part of Lithuania. this phrase "With a population of several tenths of thousands of inhabitants" is poor english, rephraser it to something like tens of thousands of people. I also agree it's highly unlikely the population could have been 200 thousands, most defnintely it would have been under 100 thousand. Back then a city of 10000 was considered big. So it's likely that there were even fewer than 50000 people living in Smolensk at the time. Of the three Smolensk regiments only one was really from Smolensk, the other two were from the SMolensk voevodstvo, I know for sure one of the was formed in Polatsk, I can't remember where the other one was from, might even have been Vietebsk or Minsk. The so called Kremlin wasn't technically a Kremlin at all, because basically a Kremlin is an equivalent of a castle and a castle normally fences in only a relatively compact patch of land. The Smolensk wall, by contrast went around a relatively large area, I don't remember the exact stats, but its total length of the wall was several kilometers. Technically it was a city wall, there were several fresh water springs within the perimeter of the wall which in part enabled the defenders to hold out over a relatively long period of time - 20 months. HAd it been just a castle Sigmund III's troops would have been able to capture it in less time. For some reason you never mention the Vladimir Monomakh cathedral which stood in the place of the modern Assumption Cathedral and was destroyed in the seige.This bit "Apart from other military monuments, the central square of Smolensk features the Eagles monument, unveiled in 1912 to mark the centenary of Napoleon's Russian campaign." is simply false, the eagle monument is not on any square, it's located in a small park that runs parrallel to Dzerzhinsky street, in fact in Smolensk there's no such thing as a central square per se, there's at least two squares that are regarded as euqally "central" and the eagle monument is certainly not on either one of them. Lenin square is still dominated by an impressive granite figure of V.I. Lenin, and Smirnoff square boasts a fairly recently constructed unorthodox monument of Terkin and Tvardovski, sitting on a log facing each other, Terkin with an accordion and Tvardovski with a notepad in hand. WWII - there was never really much fighting in the city itself during the wall. The hostilities that later became known as the battle of Smolensk in actuality took place east of the city after the city itself had been taken by the Germans, so saying that 93 percent of the city got destroyed in the battle of Smolensk, whcih can be inferred from your phrasing is plain wrong. The majority of the damage to the buildings was done by air raids and a lot of that damage was caused by Russian air raids which were more or less regular during the time the city was under German control. In fact in spite of all this quite a few buildings in central Smolensk survived the war, among them was the Assuption Cathedral. As for the hero city status awarded to Smolensk in the late 1980's, with all due respect it doesn't reflect in any way the real course of events of the fall of 1941. The very first cities to have been given the hero status were Odessa, Sevastopol, Leningrad, and they were the real ones because they were each under seige and held out for different lengths of time. Moscow's hero status was basically a bit bogus, it was given to Moscow just on account of it being the capital which is the way things are done in Russia. The hero status of Smolensk can only be rationalized with the air raids the city had to endure but not with the battle of Smolensk which was so named because Smolensk happened to be the closest more or less majore city in the vicinity, the biggest dot on the map, so to say, none of the actually fighting of the WWII battle of Smolensk, unlike the 1812 battle of Smolensk, actually took part within the city boundaries. I feel compelled to add here that in light of the more recent events the hero city status ought to be bestowed upon Grozny.

I accepted some of your corrections and additions, while discarding the stuff about the city not being heroic enough for your standards, about the kremlin not being kremlin, about the mysterious "Vladimir Monomakh cathedral", and about the purported fictitiousness of the Smolnya, which is cited by no less authority than Max Vasmer. --Ghirlandajo 12:16, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Monomakh cathedral

the original name of the first cathedral was the Assumption Cathedral, it was referred to as the Valdimir Monomakh cathedral because Vladimir Monomakh was the person at whose orders construction work on began in 1101. It was the first stone temple in Smolensk. I take it you can read Russian so I guess you might, for example look at this page

http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/kep/Smolensk/history/index.htm

on the page below there's a mention of that same cathedral getting damaged by a near by explosions of ammunition stockpiles at the end of the 1609-1611 seige

http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/kep/Smolensk/history/index.htm

I haven't seen any pictures of the old cathedral and don't really know if any survive.

Concerning Max Vasmer and the Smolnya river issue, Vasmer was a linguist etymologist rather than a historian. Are the words Smolensk and Smolnya etymologically related? They sure are. Does this etimological link necesseraly mean that the name of the first derived from the name of the river or vice versa? I don't know an answer to that. The question is though where is/was this river? Are there any maps or something like that. Obviously it doesn't exist any more but when it did exist did it flow near enough to the city to warrant the connection?

The crux of the matter is that the origin of the name of the city is simply unknown and in all probability it won't ever be discovered. There are versions, the tar version seems a bit more probable to me because I'd never heard of the river version before I read your article here, and second because I'd never heard of a river with this name ever having flown thru or near Smolensk, if you google for Smolnya , the majority of the hits will be links either to your article here on[REDACTED] or to its different copies on other web sites. Mind you, the tar version too is no more than just a version and in reality the name might have come about for reasons no one would have thought of today.

the 1941 Battle of Smolensk: the basic idea is that the battle began on July 10th and went on until September 10 and Smolensk fell on July 16th. The major setback that the Germans suffered during that two month operation was the Yelnya counter offensive (August 30, 1941- September 8, 1941) Yelnya was probably the first Russian town to be retaken by Russian troops in WWII (they had to retreat from it later though). By that time Smolensk had been occupied for weeks and it wasn't to be recaptured by the soviet army until September 1943 in Operation Suvorov.

I'm not saying Smolensk doesn't deserve the hero status at all, after all it was pretty much levelled.But it's a status more akin to that of cities like Coventry or Dresden, rather than of those like Leningrad, Odessa, Sevastopol or Stalingrad.Smolensk never had to live thru a blockade the way Leningrad did and never saw the sort of fierce house to house street fighting that went down in Stalingrad, though it did get more than its share of air raids and imho it has to be mantioned, if you want to be fair that is, that it was raided by both sides due to its relative logistical importance. But so were Orsha and Minsk. But on the other hand if Minsk is a hero city then Smolensk deserves that status too. It's just that from your article one might get the impression that the battle of Smolensk was something like Stalingrad but on a smaller scale, well it certainly wasn't, it was later named the battle of Smolensk simply because it took place inthe general vicinity of the city, mostly to the south east. You know how long it takes to get from Smolensk to Yelnya by car? I'm told more than 5 hours and Yelnya rather than Smolensk was the real focal point of that particular battle in the fall of 1941.

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/b/ba/battle_of_smolensk_(1941).htm