I want my oligarch!

[Kazan' Tiger 1]

Alla mentioned the suicides too! Makes me glad, I never had to go though it!

Alla told me it can be brutal, especially for the fresh. She said beatings occur and other very harsh hazing rituals take place. Nothing subsides until you are high enough to become a beater rather than a beatee.

You should remember the softer life is over once a boy turns 18 and goes into the Army. From what i hear it's a tough year with a lot harsh treatment. I think in a way that is a boy's right of passage in Russia...where he can no longer hide behind his mom's apron and must deal with the male side of his homeland.

I don't believe a year of much of anything is going to undo 18 years of whatever conditioning a boy gets from his family/mother, but I do agree that military service would have some kind of impact.

My wife told me it used to be two years in the Army but there were so many suicides Putin cut it to one year. It may only be one year...but it's a long year I imagine.

[peejay 327]

Belarusian family culture is identical to Russian family culture, although my mother swears that Russians are worse housekeepers and that Belarusians are much cleaner.

I've spent a lot of time in Russia itself as well, and have lived with Russian families and Russian friends. Of course women aren't totally to blame for men's actions, but constantly infantilizing them doesn't help either. Watch Ironia sudby--the scene where the guy comes back to Moscow and says to his mom that no woman is for him because no woman is as good as her and she just goes, "Oh, moi cynok!!"--total encapsulation of russian mother/son relationship.

My grandmother never forced my uncle to move out, let him do whatever he want and never blamed him for anything whereas she made my mom do all the housework and always punished her. After my grandparents died my uncle was totally incapacitated and he couldn't hold a job and lost the house (which he had never moved out of). Yeah, it's Belarusian family but it's really the same in that aspect. Trust me. I recognized so much about the way i was raised that had always made me think my mom was crazy and really different from all my friends' parents when i got to russia and lived with russians. You'd be hard-pressed to find 2 cultures more similar than Russian and Belarusian. The difference is that Russians will often see themselves as superior and Belarusians with strong national pride (those in the diaspora society my mother grew up in) are very bitter towards them. But just saying that i have Belarusian roots gets Russians really excited and they start talking about how my face is so slavic and then buy me drinks. I can speak to my mom in Russian and she'll answer me in Belarusian with pretty much complete mutual understanding--belarusian to me sounds like russian with a lot of soft sounds. We have the same religion and same food only belarusians love potatos more. Lukashenka wants to be president of a unified Belarus and Russian Federation. My grammar teacher said she's been everywhere in Belarus and practically never heard Belarusian--it's pretty much an endangered language at this point.

Also bear in mind that while you all have Russian ladies, i deal with a russian MAN every day (and sometimes his mom) and thus my perspective on this issue.

Plus i don't think relationships need power balances or struggles--just, you know, equality. Sharing housework and childrearing equally, both bringing money to the home. That's my ideal.

Both of my mom's parents immigrated to the USA from Byelorussia (now Belarus). From my limited observations, modern Russian and Belarusian cultures are almost indistinguishable. What differences I find are more regional than cultural. Russian and Belarusian surnames are different as are Ukrainian surnames even though all 3 are Slavic peoples. As far as the languages go, my mom's relatives that I met on my many visits to Belarus speak Russian. Of course they use some Belarusian words sprinkled in with it, but for the most part the Belarusian language is dead in Belarus despite attempts by the modern day Belarusian government to revive it. My grandparents were ethnic Byelorussian peasants from the countryside that immigrated to the USA as subjects of the Imperial Russian Czar Nicholas before the Bolshevik Revolution and I'm not even sure how much pure Belarusian language they spoke even back then. I think the pure Belarusian language has been dying out for a long time since being dominated by Russia stretching back into the times of the Czars.

My wife is originally from Russian Siberia, but moved to what was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1984 when her ex-husband was posted there while in the Soviet military. She took Belarusian citizenship after the USSR broke apart and was living there when I met her. This is very common throughout the former USSR. Some of my Belarusian cousins have lived and worked in Russia many years before the USSR broke up and took Russian citizenship after the USSR broke up. My wife could probably reclaim her birthright Russian citizenship if she wanted to, but wants to keep her Belarusian citizenship even though she wasn't born there.

One of the most obvious differences I noticed is that my Russian wife speaks English and Russian with a distinctively different accent than my Belarusian relatives do. There is definitely a regional difference in the accents. Several of my Belarusian relatives also speak English and it is quite noticable the difference in their accents compared to my wife's. I also detect a distinctive difference in accent when they both speak Russian to each other.

Kudos to you Eekee for learning to speak Russian. Even though I have been exposed to the Russian language since birth and am married to a Russian woman for 4 years, I am not fluent enough to hold a conversation even though I know quite a lot of words and short phrases. My American born mom and aunts often spoke Russian with my grandparents, but my mom and her sisters almost always spoke English among themselves. The Russian/Belarusian language died out in our family after both of my grandparents died within months of each other in 1967. My mom and aunts were all married to guys that spoke only English and there was really no incentive to perpetuate the Russian language in our family. Houston, TX never really had an ethnic enclave of Slavic peoples large enough to perpetuate the language and culture here. So most of the American children and grandchildren of the Slavic immigrants of that era are assimilated into America with little connection to the old country. The Cold War and the stigma of being from that region of the world in that era also contributed to American assimilation and rejection of the old country.

I took my first trip to Belarus in 1993 with my mom and several of her cousins that were born in America or immigrated from Belarus at a young age in order to meet our Belarusian relatives for the first time. It was the first time anyone had ventured to travel there. None of our family members had ever traveled there since immigrating decades ago nor had their children/grandchildren. It was an experience. My mom had always wanted to see where her parents were born and to meet her relatives there. Since then I had several opportunities to travel throughout Belarus and Russia to meet several of my relatives. In 2002 I took a train trip with my cousins from Minsk to Moscow to St. Petersburg and back to Minsk. It was impressive.