The Siege of Leningrad was one of the longest and costliest battles in history, lasting 872 days and resulting in 1.5 million Russian casualties and an additional 1.5 million evacuees. The failure of the Germans to take the city marked a significant turning point in the war, and to this day it remains an important part of Russian national identity. The underlying cause of most of the deaths in Leningrad was not military action but starvation, as the stalemated Germans changed tactics to simply starve out the entire population. This first-hand account talks about tens of thousands of people dying month after month from hunger and deprivation.
Though the people of Leningrad were forced to eat their pets and any other animals they could catch just to survive, this English Russia post honors the cats of Leningrad who are memorialized by statues all over the city (once again called St. Petersburg, of course). The cats who were lucky enough not to become food themselves were crucial to the city to keep the exploding rat population in check. Indeed, the post points out that 5000 cats were gathered up from all over Russia and sent to Leningrad to aid in rodent control. Sadly, it’s safe to assume that the cats also ended up aiding the starving citizens, but at least one cat outlasted the blockade and became a national hero:
One of the most iconic images of the Cold War era is the imposing citadel of the Kremlin: mysterious, vaguely threatening, its huge walls a perfect metaphor for Soviet implacability, its spires topped with glowing red stars that were for decades so ominous and then suddenly so pathetic. The Soviets didn’t build the Kremlin, they merely appropriated it for their own use, but it does seem like the perfect match, as if the Kremlin simply waited around until the Bolsheviks showed up to the party.
This post at the always-interesting English Russia blog talks about the history of the replacement of the Imperial Russian double-eagle symbol with the red stars and hammer-and-sickle. You would think that this was one of the first things the Bolsheviks would have done upon seizing power, but in fact it wasn’t done until the mid-1930s — a point in Soviet history where Stalin began creating the image of the mighty USSR, no longer a nation in revolutionary struggle, but an emerging power and the center of “the future of the world”.
The red stars still sit atop the two spires of the Kremlin, even though the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist almost 20 years ago. Maybe now that Communism has been more or less displaced with gangster-capitalism, they could replace the stars with the heads of assassinated Russian Mafia dons like these creepy grave markers .
Not every YouTube sensation is from or even about America. To wit, watch this video of an Uzbeki man who works as an immigrant laborer in Russia doing his own awesome cover version of a very popular tune from a Bollywood movie. He’s the hottest thing on YouTube in Russia, according to the blog Russia!, and has become a local celebrity in Moscow performing the song “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja” from the 1982 Indian film “Disco Dancer”.
Gotta love the Internet exactly for reasons like this.
Okay, stop panting over the idea of chocolate-covered lard for a second and pay attention.
Apparently, these advertising posters have been popping up all over subway stations in Russia. They appear to be promoting “American Lard” in both plain and chocolate-covered varieties. Sounds delicious so far, right? Well, maybe if you’re Russian, I guess. But in point of fact, according to this independent Russian news blog (mercifully written in fluent English by an American living in Moscow), it’s some cockamamie propaganda stunt by a leftist-nationalist political party called “A Just Russia” to convince average Russians that Americans have undue influence over political affairs…wait for it…in Ukraine. The posters are supposed to make Russians aware of how shitty American food is, which will make them hate Americans all the way around, and thus make them angry about American meddling in Ukrainian politics. Now, why Russians would care about Ukrainian politics is a whole ‘nother can of chocolate-covered lard, but I guess they might be interested on some level.
The posters are only Stage 1 in this propaganda war. Next, the party is planning to extend the campaign into the Ukrainian media (which seems an awful lot like meddling to me, just sayin’) and might even make actual cans of chocolate-covered lard to give away to unsuspecting Ukrainian voters.
But, I gotta tell ya, there’s a strong chance of backlash here, once those poor, hungry Ukrainian bastards taste the sweet, sweet goodness of pork fat enrobed in luscious dark chocolate. Few can resist its seductive allure, and from there it is a short step to deep fried pork rinds, and straight on to hardcore bacon addiction. Even Stalin loved his morning bacon, comrades.
EnglishRussia.com has a cool post today with a whole series of photos from inside the KGB Museum in Moscow. There are various spy tools like guns and sword-canes, flags and pins (what was it about the Soviets and chest regalia?), and several cases full of items seized from captured Germans during WWII, including a white Nazi uniform that looks like it belonged to Hermann Goering. My only kvetch is that all the text in the photos is in Cyrillic/Russian and the site author didn’t offer any English translation to tell what some of the photos are of.
Unfortunately, now that you American capitalist running dogs have seen the inside of the KGB Museum, you can expect a visit from two large men in the middle of the night who will help you forget everything you have seen by taking you to a very quiet, isolated place, where you will have many years to wipe these images from your memory.
It’s about 3:00 p.m. as I’m writing this post, and the DJIA has lost a bit over 725 points, taking it below 10,000 for the first time since 2004. There’s an hour or so left in the regular-hours trading day, so it’s pretty safe to say at this point that it has been a pretty bleak day for the market specifically and for the economy in general.
Our most serious problems are waiting for us just around the bend as the meltdown of the banks and now the plunge of the stock market begin to make their presence felt in the “real” economy. But in some places, the proverbial shit has already hit the proverbial fan.
Despite borrowing from the Bush playbook in their recent scuffle with Georgia over South Ossetia, the Russians are mostly just a lot of hot air…at least according to this article by international relations scholar Murray Feshbach in yesterday’s Washington Post. Russia’s economy is almost completely reliant on selling oil, so they are just as badly impacted by the downturn in the world economy as everybody else (although they might be in a better position later on). Last week I had a link to a website from a Russian fellow who says that his country is better prepared to withstand the hardships of a global depression because Russians are more accustomed to doing without, but that’s a pretty back-assed way of looking at how bad things are going to be in a country that is only just emerging from two decades of internal turmoil. But it’s not just the economy, Feshbach says. The Russian military has completely fallen apart and won’t be rebuilt anytime soon given the suddne lack of funds. The most devastating thing, though, is the burgeoning health crisis in Russia. Russia is actually depopulating at a rate so high that it cannot recover from the loss of people. The average Russian male only lives to the age of 59, compared to 72 in most developed countries. Russians suffer from heart disease at three times the rate of Americans, they drink twice as much as the WHO considers safe, and tuberculosis is becoming a national epidemic, with crumbling medical infrastructure unable to handle the uptick in cases.
Iceland, on the other hand, is in deep doo-doo right NOW. Iceland’s economy has seen a huge boom in the last decade or so, mostly from playing the numbers game in the international credit markets. Oops. The third largest bank in the country failed last week, and the government doesn’t have enough money to bail them out. They seized the bank, but the seizure may take the government down with it. Contributing to the problem is that the national currency, the krona, has collapsed and is as worthless as the currency in Zimbabwe. Over the weekend, there were bank runs as people tried to salvage what they had, and there have been reports of people beginning to hoard food. Iceland has asked for emergency inclusion into the EU so that they can abandon their now-worthless currency and convert to the Euro, but with the EU looking at rough waters, too, they aren’t terribly inclined to bring in a country that’s already failing.
The Russian website EnglishRussia.com always has fantastic photographs. Sometimes they’re intentionally funny (sometimes unintentionally funny, especially when the poster’s English isn’t so good), sometimes they are simply fascinating glimpses into the daily life of a country that most Westerners have absolutely zero exposure to. The other day this post had a whole series of photographs taken at the Moscow Zoo in the 1920s and 1930s.
I have it on good authority that the camel in this picture was later framed by the KGB as a counter-revolutionary and Stalin himself signed the orders to ship him to Siberia.
The BBC reports that the British department store Selfridge’s will officially roll out its Christmas shopping season this year on AUGUST 2. But American retail chain Toys R Us has them beat with a “Christmas In July” sale that runs this week. (although, as far as I can tell, that’s just a sale and not [...]
On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am [...]
In my copious spare time, usually whilst sitting in the waiting area at Charlotte’s karate studio, I have been making slow but steady progress toward adding tags to all the posts on this site. As of right now, I have completed tagging all the way back to April 1, 2008. The current archive of this [...]
Just the other day I posted about a young man from Nepal who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. He’s only 22 inches tall, compared to the 29-inch tall He Pingping of China, who is the current record holder. Well, WAS the current [...]
boobcheese tickle fights child actor suicides Betty White Zombie Farrah Fawcett Canadian pissing habits that milkaholic Lindsay ChatRoulette whatever half-assed thing Google did this week out-of-control Toyotas
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of all [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with: Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the [...]
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
