Talk:Posad people

Explanation needed for the term "black people"
I added a Template:Clarify tag in the first line recently requesting that someone add an explanation for the social class term "black people", which in English outside of a Russian context typically refers to people whose ancestors were from Sub-Saharan Africa (admittedly often recommended to be written with a capital B nowadays, but that has not yet necessarily caught on everywhere, so the ambiguity remains). As someone without a very deep knowledge of Russian social history, the only way that I could tell that this is not the same group of people that "black people" was referring to here was by inferring through context.

The response to this tag, unfortunately, was deletion rather than actually addressing it. I must emphasize that I was not misusing a clarification tag in hopes that someone would simply explain the term to me directly, nor did I ever suggest that the two meanings for a single term cannot coexist in their respective cultural contexts; rather I fully understood at the time that "black people" here does not mean what it usually means in English, but I genuinely believed (and still do) that most people reading in English without a strong background in Russian history will be confused by the terminology. However, I don't feel like going back and forth with undoing and redoing edits, as this would be unproductive, so I'm leaving this here on the Talk page as an open request:

If anybody has sources (or even other Wikipedia articles to link to) explaining the meanings of all of these Russian caste-related terms, especially the colour-based ones, their addition to this article would be very useful, because otherwise (A) people without a strong background in Russian history will have little to no information about what is meant by "black people" in the article, and (B) people without a background in Russian history likely will not know what any of the other caste terms mean either, even if they can't be obviously confused with any other group of people.

SyntaxW02TheThird (talk) 22:54, 26 June 2023 (UTC)


 * @SyntaxW02TheThird, there is no need to explain term 'black people'. It was a social class in East Slavic lands. They were called чёрные люди and there is no other way to translate it except 'black people'. You can read about them here and here (knowledge of Russian is required). MarcusTraianus (talk) 07:27, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Sure, there is no other way to translate it, that's fine, I stand corrected on the assumption that it was a translation issue. But an explanation is important precisely because if you don't have a background in this topic, then it's not obvious in the given sentence that it's a specific official term for an East Slavic social class. If it's completely synonymous with the terms at the beginning of the first sentence – "posad people", "black townspeople", etc – then it could also just be moved into that first bracket at the very beginning of the article rather than having it tacked onto the end of the sentence. This would be an equally non-confusing solution as explaining it, I think, and would require less effort, if it is indeed just another synonym. SyntaxW02TheThird (talk) 08:16, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
 * @SyntaxW02TheThird, I will return to writing articles on ancient East Slavic history in July, and I will write article about East Slavic 'black people' class too. When there will be link to it, no explanation will be needed. So I ask just to wait. MarcusTraianus (talk) 13:10, 27 June 2023 (UTC)