Talk:Smolensk

message: Of course, the number of 200.000 for Smolensk's population around 1400 is spurious, to say the least!
Eevn Moscow did not reach this number before the late 18th century.
And around 1400 not even Paris or Venice had 200.000 inhabitants.
:Probably you are right, but I don't like your idea that Western European cities were necessarily larger than the Eastern ones. Judging by the sheer size of urban area, Sarai was the largest city of Europe in the 14th century. --Ghirlandajo 14:00, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course, I would not deny that some early Russian towns were among the largest of Europe, like Novgorod Veliki, with 30.000- 50.000, or 12th century Kiëv with almost 50.000.
I would not exclude the possibility that Smolensk around 1400 would have been in the same order of magnitude, but I find it unlikely that it would be much more. Lignomontanus 12:27, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Smolensk was the largest city of Lithuania-Poland which was the largest state in Europe at that time. But Novgorod was larger than that, and larger than medieval Paris, for that matter. They say that modern Novgorod occupies smaller area than the medieval one. --Ghirlandajo 15:06, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

text: On one of my trips to Russia, my guide told me in Yaroslav that it was the second large city in Russia in the 17th century (after Moscow, of course). When I asked her how many inhabitants the town had at that time, she replied me "around 30.000". That would be a size I would find believable for Smolensk around 1400. Lignomontanus 12:27, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, Yaroslavl was the 2nd largest city of 17th-century Russia, and the territory of its central part hasn't expanded since then, although the current population is 620,000. --Ghirlandajo 15:06, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Medieval population

message: I don't really feel like editing this page myself at this moment
but, in the first paragrpah, river names always take THE so it out to be
the Smolnya river.
yet I don't really know where you got info about this river because to the best of my knowledge no such river exists or ever existed either in Smolensk or anywhere near it. The tar version seems to be the accepted one, since Smolensk was a layover poitn of sorts for boats traveling from the Baltic down to the Black sea, the famous route from the Varyags to the Greeks. They sailed up the western Dvina as far as they could then they pulled thier boats out onto the ground and dragged them along to the upper Dnieper. Smolensk was where they supposedly mended any leaks and small holes that mught have appeared in their boats from being dragged on the ground and they used tar to do that. Thus the origin of the name. I'll leave it at your descretion whether or not to include this info in your article, Ghirlandajo.
You somehow fail to mention that for the very first time Smolenks is mentioned in a Novgorod chronicle depicting a military tour by a Novgorod duke down to Csargrad, which was what they called Constantinople back then. In 863 they approached Smolensk but decided against messing with the city on account of it being big and with a lot of people, they decided not to waste time on it. Why this date is significant is because 863 is the year that's officially used by the city authorities to calculate the city's age.
As for Oleg, you write in your article that he captured Smolensk, but it isn't true technically, because no force was used, Oleg sort of took Smolensk in passing, on his way to Kiev where he then proceeded to seize the throne and later united Novgorod and Kiev into what was later to become known as Kievan Rus. At Smolensk he simply set camp next to the city and waited until representatives of the people of Smolensk pledged loyalty to Novgorod. The word capture usually implies use of force, Oleg didn't have to use force in Smolensk.
Mongols - even though the city was never destoryed by the mongols it was taxed by them until it became part of Lithuania.
this phrase "With a population of several tenths of thousands of inhabitants" is poor english, rephraser it to something like tens of thousands of people. I also agree it's highly unlikely the population could have been 200 thousands, most defnintely it would have been under 100 thousand. Back then a city of 10000 was considered big. So it's likely that there were even fewer than 50000 people living in Smolensk at the time.
Of the three Smolensk regiments only one was really from Smolensk, the other two were from the SMolensk voevodstvo, I know for sure one of the was formed in Polatsk, I can't remember where the other one was from, might even have been Vietebsk or Minsk.
The so called Kremlin wasn't technically a Kremlin at all, because basically a Kremlin is an equivalent of a castle and a castle normally fences in only a relatively compact patch of land. The Smolensk wall, by contrast went around a relatively large area, I don't remember the exact stats, but its total length of the wall was several kilometers. Technically it was a city wall, there were several fresh water springs within the perimeter of the wall which in part enabled the defenders to hold out over a relatively long period of time - 20 months. HAd it been just a castle Sigmund III's troops would have been able to capture it in less time.
For some reason you never mention the Vladimir Monomakh cathedral which stood in the place of the modern Assumption Cathedral and was destroyed in the seige.This bit
"Apart from other military monuments, the central square of Smolensk features the Eagles monument, unveiled in 1912 to mark the centenary of Napoleon's Russian campaign." is simply false, the eagle monument is not on any square, it's located in a small park that runs parrallel to Dzerzhinsky street, in fact in Smolensk there's no such thing as a central square per se, there's at least two squares that are regarded as euqally "central" and the eagle monument is certainly not on either one of them. Lenin square is still dominated  by an impressive granite figure of V.I. Lenin, and Smirnoff square boasts a fairly recently constructed unorthodox monument of Terkin and Tvardovski, sitting on a log facing each other, Terkin with an accordion and Tvardovski with a notepad in hand.
WWII - there was never really much fighting in the city itself during the wall. The hostilities that later became known as the battle of Smolensk in actuality took place east of the city after the city itself had been taken by the Germans, so saying that 93 percent of the city got destroyed in the battle of Smolensk, whcih can be inferred from your phrasing is plain wrong. The majority of the damage to the buildings was done by air raids and a lot of that damage was caused by Russian air raids which were more or less regular during the time the city was under German control. In fact in spite of all this quite a few buildings in central Smolensk survived the war, among them was the Assuption Cathedral. As for the hero city status awarded to Smolensk in the late 1980's, with all due respect it doesn't reflect in any way the real course of events of the fall of 1941. The very first cities to have been given the hero status were Odessa, Sevastopol, Leningrad, and they were the real ones because they were each under seige and held out for different lengths of time. Moscow's hero status  was basically a bit bogus, it was given to Moscow just on account of it being the capital which is the way things are done in Russia. The hero status of Smolensk can only be rationalized with the air raids the city had to endure but not with the battle of Smolensk which was so named because Smolensk happened to be the closest more or less majore city in the vicinity, the biggest dot on the map, so to say, none of the actually fighting of the WWII battle of Smolensk, unlike the 1812 battle of Smolensk, actually took part within the city boundaries. I feel compelled to add here that in light of the more recent events the hero city status ought to be bestowed upon Grozny.
:I accepted some of your corrections and additions, while discarding the stuff about the city not being heroic enough for your standards, about the kremlin not being kremlin, about the mysterious "Vladimir Monomakh cathedral", and about the purported fictitiousness of the Smolnya, which is cited by no less authority than Max Vasmer. --Ghirlandajo 12:16, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Minor mistakes in english plus some historical inaccuracies 

message: the original name of the first cathedral was the Assumption Cathedral,
it was referred to as the Valdimir Monomakh cathedral because Vladimir 
Monomakh was the person at whose orders construction work on began in 
1101. It was the first stone temple in Smolensk. I take it you can read 
Russian so I guess you might, for example look at this page
http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/kep/Smolensk/history/index.htm
on the page below there's a mention of that same cathedral getting 
damaged by a near by explosions of ammunition stockpiles at the end of 
the 1609-1611 seige
http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/kep/Smolensk/history/index.htm
I haven't seen any pictures of the old cathedral and don't really know if any survive.
Concerning Max Vasmer and the Smolnya river issue, Vasmer was a 
linguist etymologist rather than a historian. Are the words Smolensk and 
Smolnya etymologically related? They sure are. Does this etimological 
link necesseraly mean that the name of the first derived from the name of
the river or vice versa? I don't know an answer to that. The question is
though where is/was this river? Are there any maps or something like 
that. Obviously it doesn't exist any more but when it did exist did it 
flow near enough to the city to warrant the connection?
The crux of the matter is that the origin of the name of the city is 
simply unknown and in all probability it won't ever be discovered. There 
are versions, the tar version seems a bit more probable to me because I'd
never heard of the river version before I read your article here, and 
second because I'd never heard of a river with this name ever having 
flown thru or near Smolensk, if you google for Smolnya , the majority of 
the hits will be links either to your article here on wikipedia or to its
different copies on other web sites. Mind you, the tar version too is no
more than just a version and in reality the name might have come about 
for reasons no one would have thought of today.
the 1941 Battle of Smolensk: the basic idea is that the battle began on 
July 10th and went on until September 10 and Smolensk fell on July 16th. 
The major setback that the Germans suffered during that two month 
operation was the Yelnya counter offensive (August 30, 1941- September 8,
1941) Yelnya was probably the first Russian town to be retaken by 
Russian troops in WWII (they had to retreat from it later though). By 
that time Smolensk had been occupied for weeks and it wasn't to be 
recaptured by the soviet army until September 1943 in Operation Suvorov. 
I'm not saying Smolensk doesn't deserve the hero status at all, after all
it was pretty much levelled.But it's a status more akin to that of cities like Coventry or Dresden, rather than of those like Leningrad, Odessa, Sevastopol or Stalingrad.Smolensk never had to live thru a blockade the way Leningrad did and never saw the sort of fierce house to house street fighting that went down in Stalingrad, though it did get more than its share of air raids and imho it has to be mantioned, if you want to be fair that is, that it was raided by both sides due to its relative logistical importance. But so were Orsha and Minsk. But on the other hand if Minsk is a hero city then Smolensk deserves that status too. It's just that from your article one might get the impression that the battle of Smolensk was something like Stalingrad but on a smaller scale, well it certainly wasn't, it was later named the battle of Smolensk simply because it took place inthe general vicinity of the city, mostly to the south east. You know how long it takes to get from Smolensk to Yelnya by car? I'm told more than 5 hours and Yelnya rather than Smolensk was the real focal point of that particular battle in the fall of 1941. 
:I added the appropriate data into the Assumption Cathedral in Smolensk. --Ghirlandajo 06:59, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Monomakh cathedral 

message: I can't see a point in deleting Belarusian name of the city. It is near Russian-Belarusian border, it was part of Belarusian state for centuries, and a lot of Belarusians live in it right now (for sure the most important minority in the city); this makes Belarusian name relevant for the city enough to put it to the first row, as is usually done in Wikipedia geography articles. Thanks. --Monkbel 20:54, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "it was part of Belarusian state for centuries"? LOL! --Ghirlandajo 09:02, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

text: The only reason is that Smalensk has no English usage. The name appears at the top if it is either a native name of the country of the location or if it has some English usage. Smalenks isn't used in English, that's why. It does not prevent us to mentioning the name inside the article in the context, as it is done. But not in the first line. For more, please see the talk above as well as the ref to talk:Kiev. Thanks, --Irpen 21:10, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The question is not about Smalensk and its English usage at all, of course Smalensk isn't used in English. But you deleted not Smalensk (or may be you're addressing to some other change?), but Смаленск, which is proper Belarusian name, and should be noted as per above. --Monkbel 21:50, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

text: Cyrillic name without transliteration is meaningless, but transliteration could be added. I don't think that Belarusian name should be there, except if there is significant Belarusian minority in the city. Now, there is a question of how significant is significant? If the language is recognised by local administration it is significant. At least, that's what we are doing for cities in Serbia (see Novi Sad for example). Nikola 08:32, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why to delete belarusian name? 

message: I suggest that if in doubt how to name a person, we should use the name from the main article, not a redirect. Thus, we will use Sapieha but Vytautas the Great (or simply Vytautas). Any objections? abakharev 11:11, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Names 

message: I think we could solve the lack of balance by creating history of Smolensk and summarize it here. Andries (talk) 20:23, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Unbalanced: too much his history and too little information about the current town

message: Deleted the following from the body of the article: "(i am from russia my self and actualy from smolensk and its name comes from (smola) which only means pine sap. where the city is located is right on the river, and it also has alot of pine in the area so when boats came through the city they used the sap to water proof their boats and that is where the name came from)"
True or not, we need a little more to go on than an anecdote, and the language used is absolutely unsuitable for an encyclopedia anyway.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.208.120.38 (talk) 02:54, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Anecdote deleted

message: I would like to know for one whether the mayor testified honestly, that is, whether he named the Soviets as a perpetrators. Historian932 (talk) 16:37, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Testimony of mayor at Nuremberg about Katyn 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I added a couple of "dubious" tags as much of that section is rather muddled. I don't mean to add any sturm und drang to a contentious article, but I believe the two month delay in the German advance was due less to the Soviet counter attacks and more to German troops being diverted toward Kiev. Also, I don't understand why Goering would have been the one who ordered the destruction of the city. I also don't understand why Camp 126 is mentioned and not explained.  __209.179.9.46 (talk) 22:29, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Soviet period 

message: as opposed to other minor points this is completely unclear and unexplained  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Polyushkopolye (talk • contribs) 17:56, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  when did Smolensk which was a soviet Belorussian town become a Russian town? 

message: The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:
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Participate in the deletion discussion at the . —Community Tech bot (talk) 23:36, 7 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion 

message: In 1940, 18 km (11 mi) from Smolensk, the Katyn Massacre occurred.
:– This standalone sentence in the 'Soviet period' section is ludicrously short and uninformative. Most younger Eng.-lang. readers will have no idea what the Katyn Massacre was, infamous though it is. – We should have an explanatory paragraph on the Katyn Massacre, which took place just west of Smolensk in the Smolensk Oblast, and in which some 20,000 captured Polish Army officers were murdered by the NKVD with Stalin's and Beria's approval. Secret documents confirming this were released to Poland by Yeltsin in 1990. – Sca (talk) 18:32, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Katyn Massacre]]

message: Cretaceousa (talk) 23:29, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  There are 2 climate sections on this article 

message: The image used on this page apppears to have been clearly edited upon. It has huge white scribbly marks all over the sky and appears vandalised. If any replacement can be found, it would be appreciated. Disabled Lemon (talk) 19:30, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Request to change to picture of Church of St. Nicholas