Canadian troops were also sent into the fray, and since the White Russians lost, Canada technically has lost a war before…

I'll throw some more random word stuffs here

"a wolf" in Finnish is "susi", but "to howl" is called "ulvoa."

"Hovi" means "(a kings) court", these days a bunch of restaurants/etc are calling themselfs "_____hovi", for example theres a gas station called Pirkanhovi, the court of Pirkka lol.

This one seems to be a similar design as the ones found elsewhere.

Towards the end of the Viking period, the King erected several large military strongholds which appears to have only existed briefly.

This could be one of those.

Absolutely. The North African invasion in 1150 and the Northern Isles counter-invasion in 1180 of what’s now southern Norway really turned the tide of the Viking expansion and changed the narrative.

I am no etymologist, but I will throw up a couple loose threads that might be relevant.

"Hov" in Norwegian, is a word used in the viking age for a place of worship. Torshov = Place for worship of Thor. Gudehov = Place for worship of the gods, etc.

There is also something called Hovefestivalen in modern times. The festival in Hove, a popular music festival in Norway.

Not everything Scandinavian in the era of Viking activity was actually Viking.

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For anyone interested, the name of the father mentioned on the runestone (Runulv den Rådsnilde) means "Rune-wolf the good/fast advisor".

Of his sons names, "Thorkild" ("helmet or cauldron of Thor") and "Thorbjørn" ("Bear of Thor") are still fairly commonly used, while “Hove" (uncertain meaning) has all but disappeared (as has Runulv).

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You are correct, that mosin is worth some money here in the U.S., it was a Remington contract, here’s a video on it.

Tsarist Russia also contracted smith and Wesson to make them 1895 lever guns chambered in 7.62x54r. Those are well worth more than 4,000$ today.

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If you find you enjoy Woodward’s book I recommend you read,Simple Justice by Richard Kluger. In his book, Kluger outlines the NAACP’s long and tortured battle against segregation in education. He brings little known significant figures to life. For example, who is Charles Houston? Houston was Thurgood Marshall’s law professor and mentor at Howard University. Through Houston, Marshall joined the NAACP. When Houston left the NAACP, he selected Marshall to succeed him as head of the Legal Defense Fund. Simple Justice is considered a classic. It was originally published in 1975 and the author says that it has never been out of print. For anyone interested in the eradication of educational segregation, Simple Justice is a must read!!

USA: "oh silly me, always forgetting my troops in strategic locations in foreign civil wars"

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Didn't the USSR have the buffer of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland prior to the start of WWII? All these countries were declaring neutrality and bending over backwards to avoid offending both Berlin and Moscow, which were both trying to sway the neutral states one way or another. Kind of weird the Kremlin would conspire to eliminate the buffer to sit beside arch enemy Nazi Germany.

Also kind of weird the USSR would abandon the Franco-Soviet Mutual Defence Pact ratified in early '36 - a pact that freaked out Hitler - in favour of teaming up with the arch enemy.

Kind of weird to conspire with the German military (that had only just finished invading Russia) to provide it the secret bases to develop the technologies and tactics of combined-arms manoeuvre warfare in violation of Versailles.

Kind of weird for Lenin to orchestrate the 'Social Fascist' argument and propaganda attack on Social Democrat Parties in Germany and elsewhere. The SPD was more hated by the KPD than the NSDAP. The KPD considered the Nazi rise to power a mere temporary event, one to pave the way for the communists' assumption of the reins of the state. They were right; just had to have a second world war to accomplish it. What's a few million deaths to accomplish an objective?

And weird for Stalin's Comintern and the USSR to accuse Britain and France of starting WWII after Germany invaded Poland.

On 7 September 1939, Stalin spoke to Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov, a member of his inner circle, who was dealing with the disbelief and upset of many European communists about the Soviet-German Non-aggression Pact. (Why communists were in 'disbelief' seems peculiar to me. Stalin had signed the Italo-Soviet Friendship, Neutrality, and Nonaggression Pact in 1933 with Mussolini, the first fascist. Until '41 fascism was a minor concern. Enemy #1 was the Social Democrats.) 'A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries. Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system. We can manoeuvre and pit one side against the other to set them fighting with each other as fiercely as possible,' said Stalin. This conflict offered expansion: 'What would be the harm if, as a result of the rout of Poland, we were to extend the socialist system onto new territory and populations?' Sergo Beria, Lavrentiy Beria's son, remembered this as the time of the Soviet leaders talking about how they pitted Germany against France and Britain and that this aligned with Lenin's goal of a second world war. The first birthed the USSR; the second would birth worldwide revolution. In July 1940, Stalin reiterated the aforementioned ideas in a conversation with the British ambassador to Moscow Stafford Cripps. The Soviet leader said that before the outbreak of WWII no Soviet-British rapprochement was possible as his country focused on the demolition of the 'old' balance of powers built after WWI without the USSR, whilst Great Britain fought for its retention. 'The Soviet Union wanted to change the old equilibrium, while England and France wished to preserve it. Also, Germany wanted to make a change in the equilibrium and this common desire [with the USSR] to do away with the old equilibrium became the basis for the rapprochement with the Germans.'

>the spent remnants of the Red Army to subjugate Eastern Europe by force.

The Red Army had about 11.3 million personnel serving in '45. That's quite a 'remnant'.

In the end, the 'shed light on' apologia isn't very illuminating. The imperialism of USSR-based International Socialism was its feature. War and mass death was a price they were willing (for others) to pay.

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The operation, or your grade?

If there was backstabbing it was from the KMT about-facing on their first United Front and tried to massacre all the Communists. Then a second United Front had to be FORCED on Chiang Kai-Shek by his own command structure because he obsessively overcommited to fighting the CPC over the Japanese.

The CCP did not “backstab” the Kuomintang lmao. And the red army had 60,000 thousand soldiers compared to the KMTs 2 million. The terms of the United front stipulated as much that the CCP was responsible for Guerilla warfare and sabotage operations against the Japanese.

"The spent remnants" were the single most powerful army in the world.

Also the Revolutions podcast's 10th series is like a 100+ episodes on the russian civil war

Terrific series, except for revealing the horror of being the poor cold bastard having to chop down the poo tree.

It should be noted that only the red and black armies actually stopped pogroms. The greens, and especially the whites, were horrific and essentially were the precursors to the SS in their behavior.

It's no wonder so many former whites (and probably greens though I'm less familiar with any of their exiles after the war) joined the next Nazis as a foreign legion. It was like that with many such groups, the Lithuanians stick out in this regard. Nationalists today try to paint the nazi collaborators, including Stepan Bandera (oooh spooky scary, a putinbot saying mean things about Bandera) as just patriots who took help to "liberate" their lands from anyone who offered, and so pinched their noses and sided with the Nazis. This was not the case, they were enthusiastic mass murderers. Not just of Jews but of poles and anyone who happened to be a minority in their lands, as well as many of their own people.

Any attempt to make the reds and blacks equivalent to the whites and greens is a similar level of historical revisionism, I hate to say. It was not "pretty much everyone" doing these pogroms, it was almost entirely the whites and greens. Any time it did happen among the reds and blacks it was severely punished. There is a reason that millions of formerly apolitical peasants wound up siding with the communists, the whites arriving in your town was a horror.

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I think it was only the Whites massacring Jews. Emma Goldman, an American anarchist who was deported to Russia during the civil war for speaking out against WWI, has an account of visiting Fastov, a predominantly Jewish Ukrainian city, that had been ravaged by pogroms where they prayed for Lenin because the Red Army securing the region had stopped the pogroms:

>We had heard and read of ghastly anti-Jewish pogroms, but we had never before come face to face with their ravages. On our way to the town we met neither human being nor beast until we reached the market square. A dozen stands displayed a miserable assortment of cabbages, potatoes, herring, and cereals. Their owners were mostly women. Instead of showing some animation at the sudden avalanche of so many customers, they hurriedly pulled their handkerchiefs over their foreheads and shrank back in fright. But their eyes remained riveted in terror on the men with us, consisting of Sasha, Henry, and our young Communist collaborator. We were completely nonplussed. Being the best-versed in Yiddish, I addressed an old Jewess near by. Except for our woman companion, I told her, we were the children of Yehudim, and we had come from America. Would she not tell me why the women acted so strangely? She pointed to the men. “Send them away,” she begged. The men withdrew. I remained with our secretary, Shakol, and the women approached nearer. Soon the whole group surrounded us, each competing with the rest in their eagerness to tell us the story of their tsores (troubles).

>
>Our three male companions joined us in the synagogue. The whole assembly tried to tell us the tragic story of their town, all at once. We suggested that they choose a committee of three, each in his turn to relate to us what had happened. In that way we were able to get a coherent account of one of the worst pogroms that had taken place in the Ukraine. Fastov had repeatedly been the scene of Jewish massacres, perpetrated by the hordes of every White general who had invaded the district. They had suffered from Denikin, from Petlura and the other enemy forces. But the pogrom organized in 1919 by Denikin had been the most fiendish one. It had lasted a whole week and had taken the lives of four thousand persons outright and of several thousand more that had perished while escaping to Kiev. But death had not been the worst infliction, the rabbi said in a broken voice. Far more harrowing had been the violation of the women, regardless of age, the young among them repeatedly and in the presence of their male kin, whom the soldiers held pinioned. Old Jews were trapped in the synagogue, tortured, and killed, while their sons were driven to the market square to meet similar fates.

>
>The old rabbi being too shaken to continue, the narrative was taken up by another of the committee. Fastov had been, he said, one of the most prosperous cities in the south. When the Denikin hordes tired of their blood orgy, they pilfered every home, demolished the things they could not carry away, and set the houses on fire. The larger part of the town was destroyed. The survivors, a mere handful, most of them old women and small children, were now doomed to slow extinction unless help quickly came from somewhere. God had heard their prayers and had sent us at the moment when they had almost despaired of the Jewish world’s learning of their great calamity. “Borukh Adonai!” he cried solemnly, “blessed be Thy name.” And everyone repeated after him: “Borukh Adonai!”

>
>In the whole gruesome picture of Fastov two redeeming features stood out. The Gentiles of the town had had no share in the massacres. And no pogroms had taken place since the Bolshevik forces had entered the district. Our informants admitted that the Red soldiers were not free from anti-Semitism, but the establishment of Soviet authority in Fastov had lifted the dread of new massacres, and the villagers had been praying for Lenin ever since. “Why only for Lenin?” we asked; “why not also for Trotsky and Zinoviev?” “Well, you see, Trotsky and Zinoviev are Yehudim,” an old Jew explained with Talmudic intonation; “do they deserve praise for helping their own? But Lenin is a goi (Gentile). So you can understand why we bless him.” We too felt grateful that the goi had at least one saving grace in his régime.