Most of the older Ukrainian judges (the ones who get the assignments) were trained as judges under the old Soviet Union and points of view learned at a young age don't change much. I have been looking at the JGP protocols for years, and believe me, the UKR judges do support Russian skaters.
Can you actually consider it might be because they share the same artistic values and aesthetics, same taste in art, harmony and balance of proportions and shape/form. Ukrainian or not, it's something to do with Slavic culture shared not only among Russians, but across all Europe, especially Eastern Europe: countries like Poland, Bulgaria, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech, all Balkan countries, even Finland. It's not just an Eastern block (Warsaw Pact countries). Cold War times was just a tiny period for Eastern Europe. Those countries are still and always would be sharing very similar culture and their mutual civilization-forming trends. And Russia has been usually being the natural trend-setter and fashion-maker. Not just during Soviet times, but for centuries before. Those countries shared a lot of their common culture (read "artistic taste") between each other.
Russia adopted a lot from her neighbors and gave back a lot of cultural things too. FOR CENTURIES. It was a long and complex process. Perhaps it's hard to understand, but this was not like was in Asia, where neighbors hated each other for generations and generations. In Europe, despite all wars and old grudges, nations still shared and exchanged cultural things and artistic tastes across borders.
Russian tzars and tzarinas always were fascinated with some Western European cultural things, especially like ballet and opera. They successfully adopted ballet for example, and it thrived there in Moscow's Bolshoi and St. Petersburg's Mariinsky while this form of art almost was lost and decayed in Western Europe. Believe it or not, but we should thank Russians for saving ballet as an art and giving it a new spin of artistic development and bringing it back into popularity in the West. May be you should read more into it, especially history of arts, Dyagilev's ballet Russe, Russian opera composers, Russian avant grade art/fashion, Russian constructivism, futurism and suprematism art. Most modern architecture utilize principles of Russian Constructivism, read more about Mark Chagall, Kandinsky, Malevich, Rodchenko and many others. Especially the fact that most of them were half-Russian or not even ethnical Russian at all. But nominally everything they a are created considered in the world to be a part of Russian culture.
One can call it Russian culture, but it's really should be called as "Easten European" culture, influenced largely by Western culture. Russian Imperial ballet is a mixture of elegance of old French ballet (it's mostly lost now, they adopted modern Russian ballet and gave a traditional French spin to it) and power of expressiveness (almost hot tempered and passioned, but it's way very different now too) of Italian ballet with Russian buyoance, virtuosity and something they like to call "enigmatic Russian soul". Hehehe. Basically they danced French ballet in Russia since beginning of 18th century - very elegant, soft and graceful - famous "Vaganova" back or "singing hands/arms" technique comes from this, but then they saw more Italian dancers hundred years later in 19th century and they loved Italian expressiveness, boldness, poshness and brilliance of athletic forceful jumps (along with famous Italian pirouettes, fouettes, jetés, cabriolès, 540s and etc.)
Russian "jumping" school comes from here not only into the form of ballet, but into gymnastics, ballroom or folk dances, diving, synchro swimming and many other sports which involves art of choreography one way or another. Again: it was not just "Russian" per se, but the whole Eastern European things and still is. They might not liked each other at certain periods of their history and at some extent have political disagreement, but their people still respect culture of one another, because they share a lot of things in common. Russia just happen to be (and was) a headliner, because their tzars and nobels liked high-culture and invested a lot of recourses into art and cultural development for centuries. For a long time it was their dedicated internal national idea and politics of development of Russian/Slavic civilization, they were not just adopting and integrating western culture, but giving it further development and their own spin and spice.
Being a good liberal Jew boy as I am, I used to date Polish girl back in my days (my parents are Russian-born Jews, but our family moved long time ago). She said to me once: "They might don't really like some aspects of Russia in Poland now or still having some old grudges about the past, history and stuff, but even my Polish Russophobic aunt was usually admitting: we don't like Russians sometimes, but boy, how can they sing. When Polaks are getting drunk, they always want to hear some Russian singing". I laughed at first, but years later it got me thinking. What she meant was not about Russian ethnicity or Eastern block, it was more about their mutual culture that they bare together and were developing together for centuries. Including choreography, mentality and artistic taste.
So here you have it. It's not just Eastern block judges conspiracy, but also a solidarity of their cultures and tastes in aesthetics. If you grew up on hip hop and MTV, well, I'm sorry. If you go to the theaters (not movie theaters) in Eastern Europe you will see a lot of kids dragged to ballet, opera or classical music concert by their moms. They like to expose their kids to high-culture earlier, so they can recognize a difference between gymnast and ballet dancers.
What you are doing is probably called ethnical profiling of judges, which can be as ugly as racial profiling. Judges usually tested of their artistic tastes and sensibility to aesthetic, they can come from different contries, but they still share the same taste on proportions, harmony and perfect shape/form of choreography. This is the taste they incorporate from their childhood, because this culture surrounds them in Eastern Europe, they share it together. But for some sore losers it always have to be some kind of "judges conspiracy". A bit pathetic and kinda getting old, don't you think?
:sad21:
I thought she should've been ahead of Mako Yamashita (who kind of bored me) for sure. Oh well...there's always the FS!
