Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
…from The Preserve (Zapovednik) by Sergei Dovlatov. The scene is set in the Pskov oblast’ in the 1970s. They did not like Stalin in the village. I had long noticed that. They must have well remembered collectivization and other Stalin…
Former Russian PM Chernomyrdin, now ambassador to Ukraine, is said to use profane words so intensely in private conversation that, when he must omit them in a public forum, there are not many left at all. Despite that – and,…
The Ventilator debates an investment banker’s article on the Chinese economy. I don’t have a password to WSJ Online, so I only have access to the bits that the Ventilator quotes. (Thanks to Cinderella Bloggerfeller for the link.) All of…
Kat — formerly of uberspiffy.com — has moved her blog over to NeoZiggurat. Don’t expect to frighten us with ziggurats, neo or paleo: we have one right in the heart of town, in Red Square. It’s called the Lenin Mausoleum.…
“Soviet reporters manage to lie even when they are telling the truth.” A Soviet maxim. With the benefit of hindsight, I realize now that Soviet foreign correspondents of the dull Brezhnev days seldom if ever resorted to outright lying. They…
A worthwhile article in the Washington Post, by Peter Baker. But first, a correction is in order. For more than eight decades, Russians charged with a crime in Moscow were brought shackled into cramped courtrooms, where Communist Party-appointed judges and…
Just stumbled upon a review of a Khruschev bio. I’ve known most of the stuff all along, but I still couldn’t help laughing at the zebra/cow gig. No wonder the Political Joke became the greatest achievement and the star genre…
Pravda means (the) Truth. The best name one could come up with for the voice of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I like those multiple genitives. Initially, though, Pravda was a minor, half-legal opposition…
Whether or not Stalin ordered John Wayne killed, it is well known that the Great Leader was a big fan of Hollywood movies. As an anecdote goes, he once asked a certain Jewish Soviet composer of popular music whether his…
Vitali Vitaliev on Brighton Beach, or “Little Odessa”. I haven’t been to Brighton Beach myself; as I see it from afar, it is a Soviet neighborhood in New York City that speaks Russian with a slight provincial Jewish accent. Most…
I turned on the TV tonight and the first thing that caught my eye was a Russian atomic missile-carrying submarine getting scrapped. It turned out to be K-19, the one in that movie with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. A…
A while ago, Cinderella Bloggerfeller quoted approvingly a certain French author, Guy Sorman (Professor at Paris University, Institute of Political Sciences, teaching Economics and Political Philosophy, since 1970; founder, chief editor of L’Esprit libre, a libertarian monthly magazine, from 1995…