Re: [FT universe]

You wrote: 

>Are these related to the Ukrainians? ;]
>
>Paul "Ukrainian" Lesack

Actually based more off 9-10th century AD Kievan Russ.	In my slightly 
alternate universe, the split-off of the RH from the former Russia when 
the latter went Commie again was NOT amicable by any means.  Ukraine 
became a rather shot-up battleground and portions of it were held by 
the ESU when the shooting stopped.  The ESU didn't want to deal with 
the resultant insurgent problem the normal way, and they couldn't 
reprise 1946- with the world watching them (for non-history buffs, the 
guerilla organizations formed in the Ukraine during WWII to fight the 
Nazis went and started fighting the Soviets when they moved in, 
intending to set up an free, independant, non-communist Ukraine.  So 
Stalin engineered an artificial man-made famine that killed 10 million 
Ukranians.  This is after he did a simillar thing in the 1930s.  The 
Ukranians I've met (including an exchange student from Kiev) do NOT 
like Russians one bit.).  So they packed 'em up and shipped them to a 
dirtpoor and hostile-environment planet, along with the contents of a 
lot of Russian prisions.  To the ESU's great surprise, they colonists 
eventually formed a working government which negotiated a deal with the 
Scandanavians to trade living space for technical assistance, with the 
result that you got a lot of Swedes moving in.	This is where the 
Varangian Guard is recruited from, and brigades of Free Ukranians are 
also recruited as mercenary troops for dirty jobs the NRE doesn't want 
to have an official hand in--Volunteer Brigades make for more plausible 
deniability than Imperial Regulars.

John M. Atkinson   
PS: NRE=New Roman Empire