Now lets get to the point. I have been doing lots research on armour for about 2-3 years, I speak French as a first language and English as a second language and those languages have always been enough for me to get about any information I want on nearly any topic I ever researched until now.
In the last few months, I have tried to focus on Ancient Rus and Russian armour, I tried to cover northern slavic style of armour from the 9th century to the begining of the second half of the 15th century and I have learned a lot, but it is not enough for me and now I'm stuck.
Maybe I'm not doing my research the right way, but right now it really seems like I need to learn both Ukrainian and Russian to continue my research, since it seems like those slavs do not care for translating their research or the manuscripts to any other languages. I can't really blame them, translating old text is a pain in the ****, believe me I have done it with Middle French and some form of Ancient French (Oïl languages).
I did find general information about nearly every type of armor the rus or later the russian used, I also did find a lot about their helmets style and shields, what I can't find is which style of body and sometime arms armor where used by wich kind of soldier (I know what was in use, I do not know by who) and I also can't find anything about the construction of russian style lamellar and scale armour, I can theorise that their lamellar was nearly identic to mongolian lamellar, but the lacing patern is never described. I also have the same kind of trouble with their scale armours, I have seen mentionned a few time that they made scale overlap in a different way than other civilisations and that it made their scale armours stiffer and harderto use an upward thrust to get through, but nothing describe the overlaping pattern.
Scale armour was the reason I started researching rus and russian style, since everyone said it was unhistorical in Europe, but I had a book about wars with photos of it, so I got interested in finding if my book was a load of ****.
Here is what troubble me the most, in nearly every articles, about rus or russian armour, scale armour is mentioned, sometime it is even specified to be something uniquely popular in Russia, but there is never any informations on where it came from, who used it (infantry, nobles, horsman), how it was constructed (riveted on a holding material or laced to it), if it was used with mail or with any kind of additional padding. Usually it is quite easy to find that kind of information about any other type of armor that come from an other region, but for the Rus that kind of informations always seems to be in Ukrainian or Russian and google translate is alredy bad when used to translate less complex informations, so for that kind of stuff it is not even close to be viable. I'm also aware that on most type of armor we lack some specific information, like if it was worn with a gambeson, but usually there is always some historians or recognised experts that give a theory on what was the most likely, but here it is lacking in both English and French.
So I'm asking help, I would really apreciate if anyone could help me with finding the kind of information I can't get, especially about lamellar and scale since i want to make a late 13th century or early to mid 14th century russian set that is not mail with plate integrated into it (Bakhterets, Kol'chuga and cie). In fact I would make both a lamellar set and a scale set, since my researches led me to believe that russians of that periode prefered scale armour for infantry and lamellar for cavalry (I have no definitive proof and I will probably never have).
Sorry if my English writting is not perfect, French is still my first language.
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When it comes to any kind of mail, helmets or lamellar I have a lot and I mean a lot of images like this, that often have informative text on them.
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I also have a lots of images like this one that come from some russian or ukrainian site and I have close to no idea of what was said in the articles they were.
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This is one of the rare clear images I have of russian style scale armor and the late viking sword that is with this 14th century armour trouble me, since at that time it was outdated for almost 200 years.