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Tag Soviet Union

Random Linkage

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with , , , , , , , , May 3rd, 2010 @ 11:52 am

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.

Red Star Rising

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , November 16th, 2009 @ 10:21 am

kremlin-star1

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.

kremlin-eagle2

kremlin-eagle1

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”.

kremlin-star2

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 .

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , February 22nd, 2008 @ 3:05 pm

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:

In Soviet Russia, History Book Reads YOU

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , October 19th, 2007 @ 11:22 am

Stalin's Little Helpers

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.

Sorry, Ronnie

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , , June 13th, 2007 @ 12:04 pm

reagan-gorbachev.jpg

On his blog “Marginal Revolution”, economist Tyler Cowen links to this 2006 speech given by former Soviet Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar about the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union.

Gaidar says it can all be summed up in three words: oil and grain. The grain problem dated all the way back to the 1950s as the Soviets struggled to increase grain production in the face of a population boom. They failed and went from becoming the largest exporter of grain to one of the largest importers of grain. Meanwhile, over time the Soviet government had come to rely heavily on revenue from selling oil, and even though Soviet oil production had diminished substantially over the years, the high market price of oil in the 1970s kept the overall revenue picture satisfactory.

Gaidar is direct in his analysis:

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

The collapse of the oil market was directly responsible for the bankruptcy of the Soviet economy — without oil revenue, the Soviets could not pay for grain imports, could not continue to funnel cash into the war in Afghanistan, and could not bludgeon international lenders into bailing them out. By 1989, Gorbachev had no choice but to start bargaining away political concessions to the West in hopes of attracting money. By 1991, the political state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was extinct.

Um, I don’t see much mention of The Gipper in that analysis. You remember The Gipper, right? The guy who “won” the Cold War? Yes, the same guy who turned down the ultimate political concession — total nuclear disarmament — when Gorby offered it, hat in hand, in Reykjavik.

Good links — the Gaidar speech is illustrated with some useful graphs and is very accessible even to those of us who aren’t economists.

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