Re: Recovery, just not the normal sort


Seems this biatch of a swerver is dropping posts at random.
Maybe I should find me a decent feed...

On 2007-03-22, Mike Andrews <mikea@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
....
And from the 1800s on, the language of the Russian Imperial Court was,
I'm told, French -- although I suspect that around Peter the Great, it
helped a _LOT_ if you were very, very fluent indeed in German.

Young Peter was a rather nasty piece of work so mom and dad had to
send him to college far, far away. They picked the Netherlands where
Peter fell in love with the sea (which few Russians ever seen back
then) and learned a few languages. His 2nd wife's mother may have
been German.
Catherine the Great was Austrian herself. So yes, knowing German
must have helped a lot in 17xx.

....
I'd known about PtG's new-model army; ISTR that he created a new-model
navy as well, with ex-RN officers and petty officers as cadre.

s/new-model navy/navy/ -- before Peter Russian army was no match
for Rzech Pospolitaya, so South (Black Sea) was off limits. To NW
they had an impassable[0] swamp all the way to Baltic shore. That
left two options: North where everything is frozen 9 months a year
and the rest of the time the ground's a festering swamp and air is
90% mosquitoes. Or East, where it took 2 years to get to the sea,
so that wasn't too practical either.

[0] Except in winter. About the only time Yurrupean crusaders tried
crossing it in winter, Ruskies lined up their forces near far bank
of a frozen lake and waited. When armored knights charged, Russian
commanders ordered their men to jump up and down.
That was in 12-something, next one to try'n cross those swamplands
was Peter (going the other way) in early 17xx.

Dima

.

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