Conversation 001 First Group Meeting: On Naming Conventions
Names in ZIL are treated differently from how a Russian author might write.
I have tried to research everything as well as I could. But ZIL is fiction and not expected to be a perfect replication of Russia or the Soviet Union.
Guess what? I have read the ENTIRE War & Peace!
It took me seven days to plow through that book at the age of 21. I used up my entire seven-day medical leave from Wisdom Tooth extraction to do it. And the named characters gave me lots of grief. I often did not realize that X was actually Y until many pages later. And I was reading a physical book in the 1990s. So I couldn’t just run an electronic search for the name, go back 50 pages and clarify things easily.
So I decided early on to make my own simplified names for all the ZIL characters. I am dropping the Patronymic part of all names for the entire series. In any case most antagonist characters come with fictional, mocking names which should make it that much easier to remember who they are.
There is another reason why I might like to redact all real names. But I’ll get to that in a few years’ time.
Mission 001 part 3: Rublevka
Ethnicity and identity are issues often addressed in my works. But there are nuances that go multiple ways.
Naz and Riley often use the term Moskali. Which is normally politically incorrect as a pejorative against Russians. They are the only members to ZIL to keep using this word.
However, Naz and Riley are both also of part-Russian (or Rus/ Eastern Slavic) descent themselves. [Their ancestry is discussed in ZIL Conversation 000 First Group Meeting w Benefactors. If you want to read about that, click here.]
To make things more complicated, Stacy who lives in Moscow is theoretically a ‘Moskali’. But she is not ethnic Russian. Furthermore Stacy’s entire personality and lifestyle are completely unlike the negative traits that are associated with ‘Moskalis’.
The reality is that you can’t really distinguish Polish from Belarusian from Ukrainian from Russian genes. Everyone exists on a continuum, because the entire area belongs to the East European Plain.
The highest point on the East European Plain are the Valdai Hills. Which max out at 346 meters high. In comparison, the highest point in the Netherlands is the Vaalserberg. A 322m tall hill. Which means that the highest point in all the East European Plain, a vast area half the size of the continental United States, is about as high as the highest point in the notoriously low-lying Netherlands.
Due to the lack of geographical barriers, the peoples living in this region have moved around over time. It’s not that easy to draw a line between people’s racial origins.
So the term Moskali takes on a very different significance when Naz and Riley use it. From their point of view, they are not insulting themselves nor the vast majority of Russians. It’s not racial. It’s just opposition to Moscow-style tyranny and corruption.