On 7 November, Belarusian athlete Dmitri Belaits (2nd left) and Russian athlete Mikhail Shivlyakov (left) pulled a new Belarus-4522 tractor during its initial rollout near the Minsk Tractor Plant in Minsk (Belarus).
BMD
We’ve all heard “Ukrainian” caterwauling about pisanki. Well, it’s not true. All the Slavs do them… Poles do them (including Hutsuls and Gorali)… Czechs and Slovaks do them… Russians, Carpatho-Russians, and Belarusians do them… Slovenes, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Croats do them, as do the Sorbs and Kaszubs (the most westernmost Slavic peoples, who live in Eastern Germany and Northwestern Poland, respectively). Not only do Slavs do them, most Northern Europeans do them… Magyars do… Romanians do… Germans do… Lithuanians do… and the patterns used are very similar, considering the distances involved. That’s not all, kids! It cuts across confessional lines… Orthodox do them… Catholics do them… Evangelical Lutherans do them.
In short, pisanki are a treasured part of Easter for MANY peoples, spread out over a large part of Europe. Ergo, for any one group to “claim” them isn’t only ridiculous, it’s downright nasty. Pisanki are all-Slavic (and more)… that’s that.
BMD
This is a Belarusian soldier lighting a candle at liturgy. That’s what Orthodox people do… we DON’T badger others, we DON’T preach at them, and we DON’T make absolute pests of ourselves with Nosey Parker meddling in other’s lives. We pray for them and give them genuine good will. We save our own souls, knowing that God will lead others as He sees fit… not as we think that He should. There’s a difference! Those who want to ape Evangelicals and their “Have you heard the Word of the Lord Today” rubbish are all wet. It’s good enough to pray for others and to be decent to all, believers and unbelievers alike. I’m not God… I don’t have omniscience… I doubt that you’re any different. Keep it focused… our first duty is to save our souls… not the souls of others. “Save your own soul and thousands will be saved about you”… St Serafim Sarovsky said that, and it’s as true today as when he said it in the 19th century. That’s why I don’t preach at others… and the older that I get, the more irritating such jumped-up frauds get for me. “Love God… and do as you will”. Think on that…
Let’s keep to our traditions… what’s ours is ours, and what’s theirs is theirs, and I think that everyone can say “Amen” to that…
BMD
At present, the KPRF is experiencing a resurgence amongst young people, especially in the provinces. Most Westerners never leave the two capitals, so, they’ve a skewed and fatally distorted view of Russia and Russians. When you add in the fact that they mostly talk to fatuous English-speaking zapadniki such as Andrei Zolotov, the Blunder, Chubais, and Kasparov, one can see why the Western press and Western observers get it all wrong. They should attend to people like Fr Vsevolod, who cooperates with the KPRF and speaks on al Jezeera, but they don’t, all because he looks like Boris Badanov and his accent in English sounds like Yakov Smirnov. Yes, Virginia, they’re that superficial and stupid… they love the Blunder because of his mellifluous Oxbridge English and photogenic gee-shucks good looks. The fact that he’s the most hated churchman in Russia matters not a whit to them…
They’re missing the fact that most Russians (and Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Kazakhs, and others) want the old Soviet Union back (without the repression)… if you read the Russian internet, you see tons of things like, “My homeland, the USSR“… we should attend to THAT, not the lies purveyed by the bum-kissing zapadniki…
BMD
Voices From Russia, Too 
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