Re: [OT] Empires

Imre A. Szabo schrieb:
> > The US is also a real nation, not a third-rate pack of
> > vodka-swilling pig farmers 

I guess you could invent similarly accurate and irrelevant words to
describe Germans, Americans, Australians or anybody else.

> > I mean, how seriously can you take an empire that took
> > a mere 70 years to collapse (speaking as an amateur
> > Roman historian. . . )??

The question here is: is the Soviet union's era an apt comparison to
the Roman empire ? Or should we rather compare Russia throughout its
history - at least from Ivan the Terrible, if not earlier - with the
Roman empire ? 
Rome, too, had its civil wars, revolutions and violent changes of
govcernment. If you compare the communists with a single Roman dynasty,
their 70 years survival doesn't look too bad. And the whole history of
Russia isn't that much shorter than Rome's. Plus, Russia is still
holding together, even if it is in a bad shape.

Greetings