How to fix Russian cultures better

[ZivDero]

So I dug around the Russian Wikipedia (being a Russian myself), and found this great map of dialects of Old Russian at the end of the 14th century (so 50-ish years before the game, close enough, given how sparse sources are)

Legend:
Spoken East Slavic Dialects
- North-Western
- North-Eastern
- Central
- Southern
- South-Western

Written languanges
- West Russian
- Old Russian
- Old Novgorodian

State borders c. 1389

IMO, using this map as reference for drawing up cultures (all in 1 Russian group), using better names for them would be the best case scenario. Please rid us of Ryazanian!

My suggestions regarding names:
NW - Novgorodian
NE - Muscovite (Rostovo-Suzdal Dialect)
S - Kievan
SW - Galician-Volhynian (as in encompasses both Galicia and Volhynia)
Central encompasses a lot of Area so it's hard to find a name for it. Perhpa sleaving it as Central Russian would be acceptable, but as an alternative it could it split in 2 (the map is accroding to Georgiy Haburgayev, Andrey Zalizniak split them a bit differently)
Then it'd be Smolensko-Polotskian and Ryazanian-Kursko-Chernigovan (uhh....), but you'd also unite Kievan and Galician (which isn't that bad IMO)

 

[Calanon]

Are you proposing using the dialects as culture groups, with those names?

 

[ZivDero]

Dialects as cultures, not culture groups. That's our best guess to how the cultures were distrubuted, because as far as anyone was concerned back then they were all Russians and no one really bothered to differentiate them. And no, definitely not with those name. We can get a bit creative. Muscovite for NE and Galician or Volhynian for SW seem obvious, NW could probably be Novgorodian... Others require a bit more thinking.

 

[Mutagen_Prime]

Dialects as cultures, not culture groups. That's our best guess to how the cultures were distrubuted, because as far as anyone was concerned back then they were all Russians and no one really bothered to differentiate them. And no, definitely not with those name. We can get a bit creative. Muscovite for NE and Galician or Volhynian for SW seem obvious, NW could probably be Novgorodian... Others require a bit more thinking.

I wish intra-cultural differences within culture groups was more dynamic. At first having just read the above, I was going to muse that all Russian sub-cultures should be innately fused into a single one if that's the case, because from a gameplay perspective, those cultures are there to make Muscovy's time consolidating her rule and extracting taxes from non Muscovite-Russians significantly harder than otherwise. Then I remembered that relations between Ryazanian and Muscovites (per example) need not be so amicable if the Muscovite player/NPC nation was ahistorically running around force-converting, waging war, looting, devastation-inducing and exploiting peasantry from provinces predominated by those communities.

Essentially, it would be neato if cultures had different tolerances for one-another at the game start and player/NPC actions could shape them from being accepted cultures or violently hostile ones. Granted, this would be a slightly harder mechanic to code than 'click here and pay 100 diplo points to become BFFs with these peasants of whom's villages you just mercilessly ransacked, slaughtered and force-proselytized for the last 200 years.'

 

[fr-rein]

Central encompasses a lot of Area so it's hard to find a name for it. Perhpa sleaving it as Central Russian would be acceptable, but as an alternative it could it split in 2 (the map is accroding to Georgiy Haburgayev, Andrey Zalizniak split them a bit differently)
Then it'd be Smolensko-Polotskian and Ryazanian-Kursko-Chernigovan (uhh....), but you'd also unite Kievan and Galician (which isn't that bad IMO)

Cultures in game are split not only according to the language, but also according to political reasons.
Right now Polotsk culture makes sense as it is.
Ruthenian can be indeed split into Ruthenian and Galician cultures, due to historical and political reasons. "Galician" culture was more accomodating with Poland albeit distinct, it underwent a bigger influence and it didn't really take part in the Cossacks Uprisings, being nearly always outside of Hetmanates even at their biggest. This distinction could actually help for the number of events, decisions and history.
As for the Ryazanian-Kursko-Chernigovan... it is quite big. Chernigov and Ryazan are too distinct on many levels, saying that Chernigov had Ryazan culture is wrong, same as saying that Ryazan had Severian culture. Wouldn't it be more correct to simply split them in two, making separate Severian culture and Ryazanian culture? After all, both were quite distinct, were under different political and written language influences, with Severia being a part of the Cossack history and Ryazan being away from it. It also matters for events too - for example, Severia was a place of intense confrontation between GDL (later PLC) and Muscovy (later Russia).
For Severia there was a history of it basically breaking away from GDL to Muscovy-Russia at the end of XV-start of XVI centuries, when a number of local principals launched rebellion and switched allegiance to Muscovy-Russia. Glinskie, who were a quite famous noble family and who gave birth to Ivan the Terrible, were also like those nobles. Or the story of Jagoldai (current Belgorod), which also switch allegiance later. Or the descendants of Shemiaka, who also switched allegiance and sparkled wars of the early XVI century. I somewhat covered that here, but I hope to expand it to justify map changes and new events and dynamics in the region.

 

[ZivDero]

It is indeed quite big. The political divides you listed make sense. The area started divering and stopped being homogenous after Kievan Rus broke up, but the boundaries startedappearing even before that. So, perhaps, drawing the cultural borders between Smolensko-Polotskian, Ryazanian and Severian would be appropriate according to the old duchies of Kievan Rus as they should be quite similar.

 

[fr-rein]

The area started divering and stopped being homogenous after Kievan Rus broke up

It is not true however.
The reality is that the area never was homogenous. It is like saying that for example Germany was homogenous, it simply wasn't the case. Take a look at the history of the Rus', it was basically made up by many Slavic tribes living in it, all of which considered themselves distinct, somewhat like it was in Germany. Tribal divide is often neglected in the history of Eastern Europe, but in fact it was very important as tribes later became a base for the future political entities.
Not to mention the language. While there was a written language, there were obviously local differences in oral languages, biggest ones of which still persist today. They may have not been necessarily too distant (for example, in Italy sometimes differences are quite big between regions, local "dialects" could be more different than East Slavic languages if I remember it right) but well, history and politics made some of the languages higher in position (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian) and some were forgotten, erased or reduced to the dialects (for example Russian Northern dialect).
The unity of these languages/cultures as one group (East Slavic) makes sense and is true, just like we have Germanic culture. It shouldn't be broken down further.

 

[ZivDero]

Of course by homogenous I didn't mean that they were all 100% the same. What I meant is that after the unification they became much more similar and the linguistic borders are very based on the divisions that appeared later, and not on the original tribes.

I never denied the written languages being different. If you take another look at the original map, it has 3 written languages separate from the oral ones.