Archive for 'Soviet Union'
Who Owns The Rights To Lenin’s Face? Posted by josefina on May 31, 2008
After his death in 1924, the face of Владимир Ильич Ленин was used for mainly religious purposes, as he became known as a sort of ‘icon’ for the Soviet Union. After the death of the Soviet Union, the face of Lenin, and even more so his profile, has been used for a wide array of…
Another Part of Tomsk: the NKVD museum Posted by josefina on May 5, 2008
Томск [Tomsk] has a population of half a million and is located in Siberia, but since Siberia is a big place one is quite in the right to ask – where exactly? North-east of Novosibirsk by five hours by commute train, to be precise, the city is seated two hours north of the Trans-Siberian railroad…
Yeltsin gets a street, Dostoevsky gets married & Russian soldiers commit suicide Posted by josefina on Apr 24, 2008
Politics, huh? Russian politics are great, very entertaining and at times rather frightening – just not my shot of vodka, if you get my drift. When I started out as a ‘watcher & commentator on Russian life’ [particularly from a Siberian point of view] back in 2005 at the tender age of 20, I was…
МАЯКОВСКИЙ: Love Him or Hate Him, but Respect Him Posted by josefina on Apr 5, 2008
I’ve lived here for over 3,5 years (on August 30th 2008 it will be 4 years since I came to Russia) but I’ve only spent one day in Moscow, not counting all of those innumerous times that I’ve traveled through the capitol by plane or train. On the one day I spent in Moscow I…
Yet Another Public Holiday: С Восьмым Марта! Posted by josefina on Mar 8, 2008
The 8th of March is International Women’s Day, which in Russian translates into Междонародный женский день, or, even better – выходной день [public holiday]. Since the 8th of March this year falls on a Saturday, the Russian Federation has decided to solve this situation in two ways – one way for those not working or…
A recent past remaining in the present: a journey to the former GULAG camp “Perm-36” Posted by josefina on Feb 28, 2008
After one hour on the bus from Perm, located on the European side of the Urals, there is only snow and dark green pine trees outside my window as far as the eye can see. With at least one more hour to go before arriving at the museum “Perm-36”, those small villages that one passes…
How I Survive Communism’s Consequences and Even Laugh Posted by josefina on Feb 27, 2008
[inspired by the nonfiction book “How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed” by Slavenka Draculic] With as many inhabitants and as huge a territory as Russia’s, it is a country bound to exist in different versions for each and every person who has ever lived in it. To me it seems that among much of…