EnglishRussia.com had one of its occasional collections of Soviet propaganda posters the other day. Quite a few were familiar to me, but there were a lot I had never seen before. They range from the time of the October Revolution up to the Second World War, and mostly focus on those two conflicts, though there are some worker and peasant posters, too. Great stuff.
Earlier this week, Der Spiegel published this interview with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the formal end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as well as Gorbachev’s own 80th birthday. Age and infirmity have caught up with him, but he has remained active (if unsuccessful) in Russian politics and with his own political foundation. Recently he was publicly critical of current Russian leader Vladimir Putin. In the interview, he gives his side of the story about the 1991 coup that forced the end of the USSR, his opinions about Boris Yeltsin, and the circumstances that led to his rise to power in the mid-1980s.
Much note is being made today of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight, inaugurating the beginning of human travel into outer space. The first decade of the Space Age remains its absolute pinnacle, while today, half a century later, it seems less and less likely all the time that we will ever explore strange new worlds.
Since 2001, people in cities across the globe have marked the anniversary of Gagarin’s orbit by celebrating “Yuri’s Night” with hundreds of parties and special events. This year there is also a downloadable movie called “First Orbit” which recreates what Gagarin might have seen on his flight by taking images recorded aboard the International Space Station and combining them with recordings of the actual radio communications between Gagarin and the Soviet space controllers at Baikonur, along with an original musical score. There is also a smartphone app you can download on your iPhone or Android phone.
Probably not in the movie: the Russian government recently released hundred of pages of declassified material about Gagarin’s flight, including a transcript of a conversation between Gagarin and Sergei Korolev, the famed “Chief Designer” of the Soviet space program. It’s a fairly mundane interaction, wherein Korolev tells Gagarin where to find his rations (some sausage, tea, jam, and candy…but no Tang) and asks him to slap some tape on a broken control.
Also not widely discussed: Gagarin nearly died during the re-entry of his spacecraft. The capsule failed to detach from the instrument control module, causing a small fuel leak that resulted in the spacecraft not slowing as much as planned. The vehicle dangerously overheated, and Gagarin later reported smelling something burning inside his capsule. Six years later, another Soviet cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, would indeed die during reentry due to mechanical failures. Komarov and others in the Soviet space program knew that the spacecraft intended for that flight was defective, and when political pressure from Moscow forced them to go ahead with the flight anyway, Komarov convinced his superiors to bump Gagarin, who had been scheduled to make that flight. Komarov knowingly sacrificed himself to save Gagarin’s life. It was a sacrifice made in vain, because Gagarin himself was killed less than a year later when his test plane crashed. The cause of the crash was not fully determined until last year, and was grist for speculation of conspiracy for decades.
The United States will commemorate the beginning of its own manned space program with the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight next month. Despite, or because of, the early successes of the Soviet program, America would achieve the single greatest engineering accomplishment in human history to date — the first landing of human beings on the surface of the moon — less than a decade after Gagarin’s flight. But forty years after that milestone, the American manned space program has been diminished to almost non-existant. The final mission of the space shuttle Discovery was last month, and that shuttle is already in the decomissioning process on its way to becoming a museum piece. The shuttle Endeavour sits on the launch pad waiting to close out the last chapter of that history with its launch on April 29. Writing at Salon, New America Foundation think-tank policy head Michael Lind rather assiduously argues that manned spaceflight is unnecessary and unsupportable, and that NASA does and should continue to aggressively pursue space exploration with increasingly-capable robots and unmanned probes. Cosmos Online founder Alan Finkel argues even more deliberately that our technology has pushed our physical capabilities for spaceflight to their maximum in terms of both the physics involved in sending spacecraft into deep space and the biological limitations of human beings, and that we may not be able to exceed those limits for a long time, if ever. Even among the veteran astronauts, there is division over whether or not to continue a manned space program. Last year, Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan sent a letter to President Obama encouraging him not to cut back on the manned programs still underway at NASA, while Russell Schweickart (Apollo 9) sent another letter calling for a change in direction and the increased role of private business in space.
It does seem more likely that any further human ventures into space will be incremental for some long time to come, and perhaps Alan Finkel is correct that we may simply never find a way for human beings to travel even as far as Mars without asking the future astronauts to go on their own suicide missions. Maybe that explains why, as astronomers discover dozens upon dozens of new planets all the time, there is no sign of interstellar transit by the beings that must exist somewhere out there. Half a century after one man gently peeked beyond the curtain of our world for the first time, we are still not much beyond that window.
I bet you thought this was going to be another post about nanopants. Fooled ya! Instead, go check out this EnglishRussia.com post with photos of all sorts of textiles produced in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s. There are all sorts of awesome designs that borrow from ArtDeco motifs, Soviet Realist art, and some traditional Russian folk styles as well. Some of the patterns would be considered stylish and sophisticated even today, and some really hammer (and sickle) home the ideals of the proletariat control of production in post-Revolution Russia.
Opening Tycho Brahe's tin coffin
This week, scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark exhumed the remains of Renaissance-era astronomer Tycho Brahe to see if they could find any new evidence to explain the cause of his death, which some believe was due to suspicious causes. Brahe was legendary in his time as much for his exploits as for his science: he wore a silver prosthetic nose after his own was cut off in a duel, and he owned a pet moose which entertained guests at his castle.
The remains of Brahe's skull still have hairs from his mustache attached
Brahe is most noted in astronomy for his accurate calculations of planetary orbits made without the benefit of telescope; his apprentice, Johannes Kepler, would become the astronomer who proved the theory of heliocentrism — that the planets, including Earth, revolve around the sun. It is not the first time Brahe’s remains have been disinterred: they were exhumed in 1901 for similar examination.
A note left by the 1901 team that last examined Brahe's remains
Sometimes the remains of famous figures are exhumed for less noble reasons. EnglishRussia.com had a post the other day about the rather inglorious relocation of Joseph Stalin’s remains in 1961. When Stalin died in 1953, his body was embalmed in the same way as V.I. Lenin’s and placed in permanent display alongside Lenin’s in Red Square.
Stalin's burial in Lenin's tomb
By the early 1960s, however, Khrushchev’s repudiation of Stalin had become SOP for the Soviets, and Stalin’s body was removed from the tomb and reburied in a simple grave outside the Kremlin walls.
A simple slab is the marker for Stalin's second grave
Everybody loves the apocryphal story of how NASA spent millions of dollars developing the famed “space pen” that can write in zero gravity, while the Soviets simply used a pencil. Killjoy as always, Snopes.com says the story isn’t true, even if the moral of said story has a lot going for it. Seinfeld built an episode out of the space pen, of course, but it takes a real entrepeneur to figure out how to sell red pencils as “Russian Space Pens”. America, what a country!
Things too good to pass up but not good enough to merit their own posts:
This post at English Russia.com remembers some of the more prevalent urban legends that were common among Russians during the Soviet era. A lot of them involve being poisoned by evil Western imperialists, as you might expect, particularly through our evil blue jeans, but there are also the apparently universal legends about rats in food products, certain products being notorious aphrodesiacs, and the occasional corpse in the tanker truck.
Those of us who were paying attention to the Internet back in the early 1990s remember a time before the “World Wide Web”, when the online universe consisted of several distinct provinces: Usenet, FTP servers and “Archie” searches, and “gophers”. Gophers were publicly available databases that contained all sorts of things, but usually documents pertaining to a particular university’s research or something similar, named after the mascot of the University of Minnesota, which created the first one. The advent of the web collapsed most of those distinct information sources into one giant black hole of information, but there were still gopher sites on line right up until the last couple of years. This post at BoingBoing tells us that one guy captured a snapshot of everything he could still find on gopher sites in 2007 and saved it all as one big database of about 40 gigs’ worth of data. Because it’s almost all text, the data can be compressed into 15GB, at which point the guy ought to just copy it onto a USB flash drive and put it on his keychain for safekeeping.
Gizmag reports that the University of Granada in Spain has developed an improved artificial skin that uses a compound of fibrin from real skin samples and a seaweed derivative called agarose. It’s stretchier than previous artificial skin materials, making it a better candidate for use with burn victims.
I always enjoy the posts from TV writer-extraordinaire Ken Levine, but I was especially charmed by his fond recollection of actress Elizabeth Montgomery. He nursed a crush for her for years (and, seriously, who hasn’t) but only ever got to see her from afar despite his involvement in many TV shows over the years. Sadly, she passed away about a dozen years ago at the early age of 62, but through the magic of television will be wiggling her nose for us forever.
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 .
I guess the Serbs didn’t take the news of Kosovo’s “supervised independence” all that well, eh?
The Venn diagram above is one that’s been going around the web recently. It purports to explain the overlapping and intersecting identifications of people and places in the United Kingdom — for example, how you can be a Scotsman and a Briton at the same time. When Americans call people “British” they generally mean “English”, but while all Englishmen are British, not all Britons are Englishmen. Get it? Devolution is a big deal in the United Kingdom these days, as we’ve discussed here before. This recent article in The Guardian by journalist Iain McWhirter goes so far as to assert that the dissolution of the U.K. back into its constituent parts is now “inevitable”. The success of the SNP in wresting away political authority from Westminster is serving as a model for similar actions in Wales and Northern Ireland, and McWhirter argues that perhaps the best that London can hope for is some sort of federal system.
In the 1990s, the Soviet Union fell apart without a lot of effort once the Communist Party lost control in Moscow. While Russia and Byelorussia eventually kissed and made up, the rest of the nations that re-asserted themselves as independent states have moved on. Some, most notably the Baltic trio of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, quickly re-aligned with the West. Others simply replaced the brutal Soviet government with their own brutal dictatorships, and even the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine has not completely reformed that country’s government. The tiny country of Georgia was one of the first to shed the Soviet yoke, but they have struggled with Russia for years because Georgia controls access to valuable ports and oil. Now the Georgian government has to deal with a breakaway minority of its own — Abkhazia (via). Abkhazia borders on the Black Sea, which is why the Russian government has kept a hand in this particular conflict. As the linked article states, the Kosovo declaration puts Georgia and the EU in a tough spot with regard to recognizing Abkhazia.
You may or may not recall this from late last year: the Native American tribes that collective are known as the Lakota have declared their independence from the United States and renounced all U.S. claims to their territory, which covers portions of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana. As with the situations in Kosovo and Abkhazia, the stakes of other nations recognizing the validity of this claim to nationhood are pretty high but have been so low-balled by the U.S. government as to be almost meaningless.
But the Lakota are not the only ones talking about declaring independence. There’s an active secession movement in Vermont. Vermont was briefly an independent republic prior to becoming a state, and so the secessionists would call their country the “Second Vermont Republic”. That article also mentions in passing some secessionist groups in the Pacific Northwest, Texas (big surprise), and even California. And those are the ones who AREN’T the loonie gun-toting wackjobs!
The, of course, there’s that whole Red State Vs. Blue State thing:
Historian Orlando Figes has written a new book about life in Stalin’s Soviet Union entitled “The Whisperers”, which will be published next month.
Here are a pair of book reviews that offer high praise for the book but also capture the sense of dread and terror that they say infuse the book: a review from Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch.com, and one from the most recent issue of The Economist. Each review focuses on a different figure featured in the book, and in doing so the pair of reviews do a good job characterizing the scope of the story as it applied to different segments of Soviet society.
Sounds like a worthwhile, if depressing, effort to read. Not for the light reader (700+ pages) by any means.
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