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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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One point for having a girlfriend, bonus points for schloss and countess. Nul points for her ancestors. I'm descended from Edward the First, as are all freeborn Englishmen.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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I had an Italian girlfriend who was in the Lega Trotskista d'Italia, we met in a mountain range close to Matagalpa whilst assisting the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) against the Contra. Her father, who she loved but disagreed with, was a member of the Italian Communist Party. I honestly thought I was in love, but she quickly saw through me. I could say, now, that our break up was down to mature political differences, and we parted on good terms. In truth, it was more a case of that, in her eyes, I exhibited a number of incurable, really, really, really, irritating anti-social bourgeois tendencies.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | I'm descended from Edward the First, as are all freeborn Englishmen. |
Edward the First? From the House of Plantagenet?
| The House of Plantagenet was a royal house which originated in the French county of Anjou. |
Ah, so, you're really French then? But not Norman French.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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No points for having a girlfriend, Wiley, you're quite ordinary looking, but a mountain range always impresses the judges. Unless you were a chalet boy for Thompson Holidays.
You don't give the year so it is difficult to evaluate a party that has retained Trotsky in its title, though belonging to any non-orthodox Communist party in Italy is worth a mention in dispatches. The father-daughter relationship is, frankly, dull. You could, at the very least, have taken sides.
You started well with the politically star-crossed lovers but 'parting amicably' let you down badly. This is a poor show, Wiley, I was expecting better.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Me thinks Wiley should appeal to the adjudicators. Seems a trifle unfair, or even capricious, that I can get a point for mentioning a girlfriend, and then Wiley gets zero.
Although I'm now in a quandary. Should I risk mentioning any other girlfriends? I'm never sure whether the current Lady Boreades is reading these posts and making notes. To be thrown back at me (with added venom) in a few years' time at some crucial point in an argument.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Mick Harper wrote: |
You started well with the politically star-crossed lovers but 'parting amicably' let you down badly. This is a poor show, Wiley, I was expecting better. |
I thank you for your ever kind encouragement to walk across the river.
It is most considerate of you to keep doing this, when I always climb out, wet and bedraggled.
Many would have simply given up on me.....
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| After the failure of the putsch in Moscow on 28 Augustus 1991, the Supreme Council renamed the country to ‘Republic of Tuva’. |
I don't know how common it was for administrative districts of the Russian SSR to have Supreme Councils, but I do know they were composed one hundred per cent of Moscow-approved communist apparatchiks.
| The Constitution of the Tuvan Republic of 21 October 1993 (‘Tuvan Constitution’) declared in its Art. 1 (1) that the Tuvan Republic as a ‘sovereign democratic state’ within the Russian Federation |
Can I stop you there, chaps. You cannot be sovereign or democratic or a state if the first article of your constitution ordains you must be within the Russian Federation.
| ‘has the right to self-determination and to secede from Russia by way of a nation-wide referendum’ (self-determination; referendum). |
You may have the recht, but do you have the macht?
| Art. 1 (2) Tuvan Constitution proclaimed that the Constitution and Tuvan laws would be in force even in times of martial law, or a political or State power crisis in the Russian Federation. |
You mean, it has to be put down in black and white for when the situation is not black and white.
| Art. 1 (3) Tuvan Constitution said that ‘the basis of the State’s sovereignty consists of the right … to conduct its foreign and domestic policy’. Art. 63 (3) Tuvan Constitution stated that the Supreme Khural was entitled to ‘render decision on issues of war and peace’. |
There's only a limited number of people you can be at war or peace with, guys. Russia and Mongolia basically. Except somehow you've ended up losing more citizens per head of population than any part of Russia in a war against Ukraine arising out of... er.. well, they are largely set out above.
More, but not much more...
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | You cannot be sovereign or democratic or a state if the first article of your constitution ordains you must be within the Russian Federation. |
Out of idle curiosity, or by way of an analogy, or just a rabbit hole:
The United States of America.
Constitutionally, are each of the individual states Sovereign States in their own right?
Or perhaps they were until they joined the Federal Republic of the USA.
Which sounds (a bit) like the American Federation.
And (I'm told) it's a Federation of Republics, not of Democracies.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The Americans got it right first time of asking. I will end the Tuvan story here but one feels--one hopes--it isn't the end of the story for the Tuvans.
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| The constitution of Tuva was supported by a referendum on 12 December 1993 when 53.9% of the voters approved the Tuvan Constitution, whereas only 29.7% voted in favour of the new Russian constitution. |
A slightly odd way of putting it but was there a backstory? Or a wider one?
| In 1992 a Tuva-Mongolia economic and cultural relations agreement was signed and in December 2001 a Russian-Mongolian border agreement was finally concluded. |
I cannot say how 'real' all these negotiations were.
| Due to a new policy of centralization launched by President Putin, the Supreme Khural had to amend the constitution. |
This was one year into Putin's reign!
| A new constitution—excluding some of the abovementioned rights of sovereignty and the special status of Tuva—was long-debated upon. |
I bet it was. I bet they voted for the Putin model in he end.
| The new constitution was finally composed and adopted by referendum on 6 May 2001 and then again amended in 2002. |
Sounds like it.
| According to the new constitution, certain functions of the elected head of State and head of the government became united and the two-chamber (130+32) Great Khural was established (the first elections took place in 2002). |
They do like their window-dressing. What about the actual actualité?
| While the 1993 constitution had still pronounced Tuvan as the State language while Russian remained the federal-State language, now both were declared to be on an equal level as official languages. This lost struggle for constitutional rights meant an end to attempts to preserve several features of semi-independence based on the past of Tuva, comparable with sovereignty claims of other Russian subjects. |
Any problems, Vlad?
| It should also be noted that Tuva was the only part of Russia where the governing party ‘United Russia’ had to share power in 2006–2009 with the nationalists gathered under the name ‘A Just Russia’ that dominated the 32-member lower House of the Parliament. |
What did you do, Vlad?
| Thereafter, ‘United Russia’ established the monopoly of its power and ideology (the 1914 decision about protectorate meant merging of two countries) in Tuva. |
Thereafter. Has the bell tolled? /Ends
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