terminology

[howsmyenglish]

And completely unrelatedly, I just want to say that the former Soviet Union and Russia (whether now or then) are not synonyms. Not that I was offended or anything, but I just wanted to mention it, because several people have responded to some of my previous entries using the R word, when I used the SU one. I've never lived in Russia. I was a German, whose family was displaced from the Caucasus to Kazakhstan.

Comments

[iddewes]

Yes some people are pretty ignorant about that. It’s similar to people who think the UK and England are the same.

[howsmyenglish]

True.

[meowmensteen]

I usually figure that if someone says their from the Soviet Union, it's because they moved around to different parts of the union during their childhood and that it's simpler than explaining all the details.

[howsmyenglish]

I usually figure that if someone says their from the Soviet Union,it's because they moved around
No, I wouldn't say that. It's more about the history and the time. Soviet Union and present day Russia are not only not the same geographically, but also culturally, phenomenologically, religiously, etc.

Also, people didn't really move around in the SU. It was really hard to even find another apartment to move to in the same city, next to impossible to move to another one.

[meowmensteen]

That makes sense, the whole time thing rather than a place thing.

[notliketonight]

I had never thought about this possible confusion, but your clarification is very valid... there are countries that, for different reasons, simplify concepts (on the news, and sometimes when educating in school) and then their people are left with incorrect information. Perhaps this is what has happened to those who confused the Soviet Union with Russia.
And I have to admit nobody explained the difference between United Kingdom and England to me when I was at school *hides under the desk*
I know it now, though... better late than never! 😅

[heartonsnow]

I am confused by Geography and I apologise.

I was always told my dad's side came from Russia but it is Russian Lithuania, so not physically Russia at all.

[howsmyenglish]

There's absolutely no need to apologize, as I said, I was not offended in any way.

I should be careful, however, in calling Lithuania Russian - Lithuanians will be offended by that.
Those three countries - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia opposed the Soviet rule over them vigorously and from the very beginning. There are Russians, who live in those countries, but the countries are not Russian.
Your dad's relatives might have been Russians from Lithuania. Some Russians fled to Lithuania way before the Soviet Union came into being, because of religious persecution.

[heartonsnow]

Thank you for this information. I was never very good at history or geography in school but all of this, I find very interesting.

[howsmyenglish]

You're welcome :)

[hamsterwoman]

I've never lived in Russia. I was a German, whose family was displaced from the Caucasus to Kazakhstan.

It gets really complicated, doesn't it... (also, I didn't realize-- so was it Kazakhstan you lived in before emigrating to Germany?)

I have also never lived in Russia (not counting a month I spent at my great-uncle's dacha by Piter the summer after Chernobyl), but I used to answer Russia, Ukraine, or "I was born in the former USSR/Soviet Union" fairly interchangeably when speaking to Americans -- and actually Ukraine probably less often, because people were less likely to know where/what that was, and I never lived in the country called Ukraine either (since we left before 1991), and also the follow-on question was almost always "so do you speak Ukrainian", and then I would have to explain that while I do still speak a little bit of school-learned Ukrainian, what I speak as a native language is Russian.

These days, of course, I no longer treat them interchangeably. I now go for the whole "Russian-speaking Jew from (what is now) Ukraine" explanation. It helps to be able to add "like Zelensky", though I'm not sure it provides any additional context for most people I'm talking to.

(New conundrum has been teaching myself to pronounce the name of my home city a different way than I pronounced it my entire life until 2022, outside of songs...)