Between the Clock and the Bed.

Since the contested election in Belarus, I've been riveted, as perpetually fascinated by these European locales. In watching coverage of the protests, as well as a few older documentaries, it finally occurred to me that Minsk (where I passed through during USSR times but didn't stop) retains so very much of that old Soviet feel that it's uncanny.

In short, always be suspicious of perfectly clean urban areas. They're more Disney-fied than real, and usually for all the wrong reasons (and I'm no fan of Uncle Walt, mind you).

Imagine my delight in this ...

Minsk: Owen Hatherley on the world's most complete, and most surprising Soviet city (The Calvert Journal)

Whether hostile or complimentary, all accounts of Belarus will mention the extreme Sovietness of its capital, the equally extreme cleanliness and lack of commercial pollution and/or vibrancy. This leads to some interesting errors. Historian Andrew Wilson, in his otherwise convincing critique of the Lukashenko regime, The Last European Dictatorship, describes its dominant style erroneously as Brutalist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Minsk is arguably the greatest neoclassical European city of the 20th century, with most buildings in the city centre resplendent with colonnades, baroque archways and romantic skylines of spires, obelisks and heroic sculptures, all on an axial plan integrated with landscaped parklands around the river Svisloch. This is the direct result of one of the least known episodes of the Second World War — the intensity of resistance in Soviet Belarus to the Third Reich. It deserves to be as well known as that of Poland or Yugoslavia, but isn’t, largely because it isn’t useful to anybody much, save perhaps Lukashenko’s unpleasant government.

... and by extension, this.

Melancholy of obsolete futures at (The Critic)

Alexander Adams on Soviet Brutalism and where to read about it

Brutalism has seen a surge in interest among young people keen on bold uncompromising Modernist design. Whole books of moody photographic studies of concrete buildings are snapped up by fans of urban life and retro design. A crop of new books explores the Brutalism of socialist states.

While Constructivism and avant-gardism in fine art came to prominence during the October Revolution, it was suppressed in favour of Socialist Realism by the mid-1930s. In architecture more adventurous forms and materials persisted, although in the minority. Under Stalin there was a degree of stylistic conformity and austerity, yet adventurous architecture was not seen as “bourgeois formalism” as it was in art. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, historicism receded and a greater variety of art, design and architecture (including Modernist architecture) became possible.

While supposedly for the masses, many of the showpiece constructions were moribund from the start: inverted ziggurat hotels that were barely occupied and shopping centres with few consumer goods to offer. Much of this architecture was completed less than a decade before the economic and political collapse of the Eastern Bloc.

In postcards, gargantuan apartment buildings — veritable terrestrial ocean liners — tower over public spaces, making farm-near-me/">miniatures of two-tone buses and Trabants. Third-Worldism (also called the Non-Aligned Movement) was a political position of the mid-century decades that apparently offered advantages of alliance to states that pledged to remain equidistant between socialism and democratic capitalism. In practice, most post-colonial states in Africa, South America and South Asia following Third-Worldism did turn to the two superpowers, which provided strategic assistance in return for favourable trading status or military co-operation, thus forming indirect and unstated alliances rather than outright ones.

These are the books described in the article. I can't afford to buy them all, but I wish it were possible. Come to think of it, I just might, anyway.

Consumer Culture Landscapes in Socialist Yugoslavia – Lidija Butković Mićin, Nataša Bodrožić, Saša Šimpraga
East German Modern – Hans Engels
Imagine Moscow – Deyan Sudjic, Jean-Louis Cohen, and Richard Anderson
Soviet Metro Stations – Christopher Herwig
Architecture in Global Socialism – Łukasz Stanek

Man from the Magazine.

Alexander Lukashenko is the offspring of another universe.

He graduated from the Mogilev Pedagogical Institute (now Mogilev State A. Kuleshov University) in 1975, after 4 years studying there and the Belarusian Agricultural Academy in Horki in 1985.

He served in the Border Guard (frontier troops) from 1975 to 1977, where he was an instructor of the political department of military unit No. 2187 of the Western Frontier District in Brest and in the Soviet Army from 1980 to 1982. In addition, he led an All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol) chapter in Mogilev from 1977 to 1978. While in the Soviet Army, Lukashenko was a deputy political officer of the 120th Guards Motor Rifle Division, which was based in Minsk. He later rejoined as a tank specialist.

In 1979, he joined the ranks of the CPSU. After leaving the military, he became the deputy chairman of a collective farm in 1982 and in 1985, he was promoted to the post of director of the Gorodets state farm and construction materials plant in the Shkloŭ district. In 1987, he was appointed as the director of the Gorodets state farm in Shkloŭ district and in early 1988, was one of the first in Mogilev Region to introduce a leasing contract to a state farm.

The Soviet system, of which Belarus was a component until the USSR fell apart in 1991, functioned to advance non-entities like Lukashenko. In some ways, like making a university education available to those of hardscrabble upbringings, this was admirable.

And, glancing at Lukashenko's CV, it can be seen that he knew exactly how the bread was buttered. In short, he gravitated to the political organizations attached to the military and agriculture, proving his bona fides in these groupings, where the real power resided. It's entirely reasonable to imagine that had the USSR not collapsed, Lukashenko still would have emerged as a regional power broker.

How much any of this matters now is an open question. This article explains it quite well without quoting the late Kenny Rogers ("The Gambler").

We also can assume that Lukashenko has a nest egg in the Bank of the Kremlin should event require relocation.

'We will perish': embattled Lukashenko sends SOS to Putin, by Andrew Roth (The Guardian)

Belarusian leader seeks Kremlin support against external threats as analysts predict an end to his rule

 ... Putin has stopped short of offering support or an endorsement of Lukashenko, who is facing the gravest crisis of his career. It is likely that Moscow will wait and see whether Lukashenko can survive the next weeks or even days, as protests and labour strikes grow and pressure mounts on him to leave office.

“Now it’s clear that Lukashenko’s era is over, and I think that’s clear for everyone in Moscow, including in the Kremlin,” said Dmitry Suslov, a professor and foreign affairs expert at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics.

Even if the Belarusian leader does limp through this crisis, Suslov said, his model of president-for-life probably will not. People around Lukashenko are reported to have already sounded out the Kremlin on fleeing to Russia if he is deposed, according to a Bloomberg report ...

За нашу дружбу! Allan Gamborg and his updated Soviet Digital Art website.

Regular readers will recall that over the years, I've repeatedly doffed my уша́нка (ushanka -- it's the furry cap) in the general direction of Allan Gamborg.

It's hard to believe 33 years have passed since I first met Allan, Kim Andersen and Kim Wiesener during the rambunctious summer of '87. These three Danes of the apocalypse have been artfully weaving in and out of my travel narratives ever since, as during this famous escapade (in Allan's own words):

For example, I still think of the evening in that Belgian beer place (2000?), where all got complete rat-assed and the party just dissolved in utter chaos.

Ah, those were the daze.

Allan has lived in Moscow for more than two decades, and somewhere around his third or fourth career in the workaday world he assumed yet another identity: purveyor and advocate of Soviet-era art and artists.

You need not have an opinion about Vladimir Putin, or be a dirty rotten Commie, to enjoy Allan's web site. You merely must appreciate art.

Today an update arrived.

Dear Friends,

I hope you are all well and safe in these turbulent times.

I have been spending a significant part of the time in self isolation updating my art database with photos, descriptions and artists’ biographies.

All this material you can find online - art works and descriptions - for about 900 (mainly Soviet) artists.

If you have a free minute (or some vacant days), and wish to relax with some art – please visit.

Artist Portfolios

Best wishes,

Allan

Here's the full story.

This website is dedicated to Soviet Art and Socialist Realism in the 20th century. We feature a large number of Soviet and socialist fine arts and posters as well as applied arts and design of that period.

The artists featured were active in the Soviet Union from the 1920s through the 1970s, and their works cover Russian avant-garde, socialist realism as well as the non-official underground art of the 1960s and 1970s.

The collection contains Soviet fine arts, mural designs, graphics, prints and USSR posters, and a unique assortment of applied arts, textile and fashion designs, and tapestries of the 1950s and 1960s. We also show a number of theater designs, including costumes, set designs and curtains. Another specialty of the gallery is children's book illustrations of the 1950s and 1960s.

Thematically, we often focus on Soviet art works and posters telling stories about people and their city or village, work, industry, culture, politics, and works of art illustrating the era and its history as a whole. Specific topics include Soviet agriculture, sports, theater and ballet.

The artists featured were taught by the most famous artists of the late 19th and the early 20th century, and studyed at the most prestigious art schools of the Soviet Union at the time: The VKhuTeMas, the Polygraphical Institute, the Surikov Institute, the Repin Institute, the MIPIDI, and the Moscow Textile Institute.

Most artists featured led a “double” artistic life. On the one hand, they were all members of the state controlled Artists’ Union, being on the state budget of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, producing Soviet art works in support of Soviet ideology, socialist realism, propaganda posters, etc. On the other hand, they took every opportunity to paint for themselves, i.e. painting themes and in styles they personally preferred. Working on genres such as landscape, cityscape and still-life was a manifestation of artists' independence from official ideology.

Many of these works of art were lost to the dust of artists' studios. Here we aim at showing both aspects of the artists’ works.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone and "Russian experiments in life after death."

Photos: Lenin's Mausoleum, 1989, from my collection. Indoor photography was not allowed, to put it mildly.

If it's really strange reading you're looking for, may I suggest this review in The Nation of a book by Anya Bernstein called The Future of Immortality: Life and Death in Contemporary Russia. The review begins with cryogenics and then really leaves the tracks.

The Collective Body: Russian experiments in life after death, by Sophie Pinkham

... This practice (of life-extending blood transfusions) has its origins in a truly utopian and egalitarian, if even more biologically suspect, experiment. Aleksandr Bogdanov, a prominent early Bolshevik and science fiction writer, investigated the rejuvenating properties of blood transfusions in the 1920s, though he soon died after exchanging blood with a tubercular student. As anthropologist Anya Bernstein discusses in The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia, Bogdanov’s hope was not merely to prolong the lives of individuals; he envisioned a sanguine communism in which all were granted an equal share of society’s collective health through blood exchanges.

You only thought you knew why the USSR failed.

“All social doctrines … all the social utopias humanity has tried to achieve have stumbled up against the short-breathedness of man,” (Anastasia) Gacheva tells the crowd. “The utopias stumbled on man’s deepest misfortune, which is his mortality. Mortal man cannot be made happy. This is why communism did not succeed.” Needless to say, this is a novel diagnosis of communism’s failure. It wasn’t the command economy, the Cold War, or growing popular resistance that brought the Soviet Union down but rather the failure to achieve eternal life. Until all people unite in the common cause—the struggle against death—the world will be rife with conflict, whether or not the state professes itself a utopia.

I'm headed back to reread this essay, this time with a couple belts of vodka.

Russian photographer Arseniy Kotov and his ode to everyday Soviet architecture.

Volgograd, Russia; from the article.

It's a book to add to the must-have list in 2020. Meanwhile click through to Atlas Obscura and check out the images.

A Photographer’s Ode to Everyday Soviet Architecture, by Winnie Lee (Atlas Obscura)

Arseniy Kotov finds inspiration in urban exploration and concrete cityscapes.

Concrete is a common, humble material—sand, gravel, and cement—but Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sang its praises for the better part of a passionate, detailed, two-hour speech he delivered to an industrial conference in 1954. He proposed that concrete should be used for anything and everything, especially prefabricated and standardized buildings that would help accelerate construction and development. It was, he argued, absolutely vital to the Soviet project. The subsequent boom in mass housing was described by The New York Times in 1967 as an “architectural sputnik.” (Though the piece did also state, “There is no real style in Soviet cities yet.”)

Concrete is abundantly present in the contemporary cityscapes of Russian photographer Arseniy Kotov. Images from his upcoming book, Soviet Cities: Labour, Life & Leisure, often depict rows and rows of high-rises, marching endlessly across the horizon. Yet within the cold-looking concrete blocks, he also manages to capture the warm glow of life in apartment windows.

Kotov was born in 1988, so he did not experience much of Soviet life, but he admires the period’s “great civilization” of architectural and cultural heritage. The country is changing fast, but nostalgia for Soviet aesthetics is strong.

Kotov traveled to hundreds of Russian cities over three years, and plans to visit more. “Every new place hides its secrets,” he says via email. “It is normal here (in ex-USSR cities) to feel yourself like an archaeologist, who came to the ruins of great ancient civilization, and didn’t know what you would find!”

The photographer spoke with Atlas Obscura about his enthusiasm for Soviet history, fascination with rockets, and nighttime adventures. His book will be published in 2020 by FUEL Design & Publishing ...

A Lenin museum in Russia, "still powered by vintage Apple technology."

Finally it dawns on me that while today's youth recognizes Apple, if not the archaic model referenced in this article, many probably have little idea who Lenin was apart from the guy in the Red Room poster.

Hence the refresher video.

Russia's Retro Lenin Museum Still Runs on Decades-Old Apple II Computers, by Yuri Litvinenko (Atlas Obscura)

THE VERSATILITY OF THE APPLE II made it one of the most widespread personal computers of the 1970s and 80s. In schools, labs, and even command centers, these classic American computers kept a foothold even after the advent of more advanced machines. But of all the places you’d expect to find the computer that popularized The Oregon Trail, the mournful museum of a Communist leader is one of the most unlikely.

Lenin Museum in Gorki Leninskiye, located 20 miles south of Moscow, doesn’t look hi-tech even by 1980s standards. But among black marble interiors, gilded display cases, and Soviet historical documents, there is an elaborate audiovisual show about the last years of Vladimir Lenin’s life. Opened in 1987, it’s still powered by vintage Apple technology.

Capitalism and communism: "Sometimes bad service is class struggle."

Black Market Bill and Open Season Barr, Moscow, 1987

I made three visits to the USSR during the 1980s, and to be honest, my personal sampling in terms of time spent on the ground was far too small to comment on the pros and cons of the era's Soviet service. As a foreigner, I didn't have to queue around the block for something that might no longer be available when finally reaching the front of the line.

However, the black market was highly personable and efficient. There may or may not be a lesson there.

In Defense of Soviet Waiters, by Peter Frase (Jacobin)

Sometimes bad service is class struggle.

 ... (Tim) Noah describes the way Pret a Manger keeps “its sales clerks in a state of enforced rapture through policies vaguely reminiscent of the old East German Stasi.” I was reminded of the Soviet model too, but in a different way. I’m just old enough to remember when people talked about the Communist world as a really existing place rather than a vaguely defined bogeyman.

And one of the mundane tropes that always came up in foreign travelogues from behind the Iron Curtain concerned the notoriously surly service workers, in particular restaurant waiters. A 1977 newspaper headline reads “Soviet Union Takes Hard Look At Surly Waiters, Long Lines.” In a 1984 dispatch in the New York Times, John Burns reports that “faced with inadequate supplies, low salaries and endless lines of customers, many Russians in customer-service jobs lapse into an indifference bordering on contempt.”

One can find numerous explanations of this phenomenon, from the shortcomings of the planned economy to the institutional structure of the Soviet service industry to the vagaries of the Russian soul to the legacy of serfdom.

But one factor was clearly that Soviet workers, unlike their American counterparts, were guaranteed jobs, wages, and access to essential needs like housing, education, and health care. The fear that enforces fake happiness among capitalist service workers — culminating in the grotesquery of Pret a Manger — was mostly inoperative in the Soviet Union ...

"Lithuania's barking-mad Soviet-era theme park has barking dogs and barking ex-KGB," but ironically, no place to walk your dog.

Tanned, rested and ready, my masterpiece development plan is ready to be TIFFed: The Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness.

LITHUANIA’S BARKING-MAD SOVIET-ERA THEME PARK HAS BARKING DOGS AND BARKING EX-KGB, by Colton (Ripley's)

If you’ve ever wanted to trudge around in the cold while being shouted at in Russian, the could be the perfect vacation spot.

Set in a Soviet-era bunker, 1984: Survival Experience visitors are treated as though they were Lithuanian citizens under the control of the communist Russian military. The dramatization starts with putting on heavy, damp jackets. A German shepherd and ex-KGB officer bark orders as you enter your new Soviet paradise. Yes, ex-KGB. Believe it or not, all of the attractions actors were in the Soviet army. Some even interrogators trained in psychological tactics.

It gets real ...

Three reminders of rock music's role in defeating the Communist bogey man.

I intend to watch this soon.

​FREE TO ROCK is a documentary film directed by 4-time Emmy winning filmmaker Jim Brown and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland. Rock & Roll spread like an uncontrollable virus across Eastern Europe despite Communist attempts to outlaw it. Thousands of underground bands and millions of young fans who yearned for Western freedoms and embraced this music as the Sound of Freedom, helped fuel the nonviolent implosion of the Soviet regime. Free to Rock features Presidents, diplomats, spies and rock stars from the West and the Soviet Union who reveal how Rock & Roll music was a contributing factor in ending the Cold War.

I intend to read this soon.

BURNING DOWN THE HAUS: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, by Tim Mohr (Kirkus)

How a forbidden punk-rock underground fomented rebellion against totalitarian East Germany.

A translator and former Playboy staff editor and club DJ in Berlin, Mohr carefully documents a rousing, little-known Cold War story, showing how alternative culture developed in the Eastern Bloc in a similarly grass-roots fashion as elsewhere but for greater stakes. “The ethos of East Berlin punk,” he writes, “infused the city with a radical egalitarianism and a DIY approach to maintaining independence.” But during the 1980s, homegrown punks were seen as both a nuisance and threat, worthy of repression. Based in part on interviews with survivors, Mohr ably documents how regional small-scale punk scenes grew and connected nonetheless. From the start, he notes, “groups of punks started to attract attention from security forces everywhere they went.” East Germany provides a vivid backdrop to the narrative. Conformity to state-supervised existence was enforced by surveillance and informants, so punks’ embrace of abrasive music and fashion was inherently political ...

And, I haven't forgotten the Plastic People.

How a Revolutionary Czech Rock Band Inspired Vaclav Havel, by James Sullivan (Rolling Stone)

Havel met the Plastic People of the Universe in 1976

It took a Czechoslovakian rock band that worshipped Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground to make Vaclav Havel realize the true power of rebellion. Havel, the Czech playwright, humanitarian and political revolutionary who died yesterday, put his movement on the line with the manifesto known as Charter 77, which was directly inspired by an underground rock band called the Plastic People of the Universe.

Named after a Zappa song, the Plastic People formed in 1968, shortly after the suppression of the uprising known as the Prague Spring. They played a psychedelic brand of garage rock like their American heroes, including the Velvets, Captain Beefheart and the Fugs, says Paul Wilson, a Canadian who was teaching in Prague at the time. Wilson joined the band in 1970 at the request of their manager, Ivan Jirous, a culture critic who acted as a kind of art director for the group, much as Andy Warhol did for the Velvet Underground ...

"Turning horror into comedy" in the brilliant film The Death of Stalin.

Undoubtedly The Death of Stalin is the best film I've watched this year.

It's also the only film I've watched this year.

These two positions are compatible because I know how to pick 'em, having grown to hate wasting time on waves of comic book crap when I could be reading instead.

It's a satire overload, and I'm reminded just a bit of the original cinematic version of M*A*S*H, insofar as the viewer can be gut-laughing amid scenes depicting death and deathly seriousness, with humor and revulsion occurring all at once.

Dargis' review (linked below) aptly summarizes the experience. As a longtime student of Russian and Soviet history, I'll add only that the characterizations are surprisingly accurate, if exaggerated for comic effect.

Khrushchev really did perform the part of the buffoon to mask his own ambitions, and Molotov really was willing to sacrifice his own family for the greater good of the party. Beria was an epochal, world-class sociopath whose messy end may actually have paralleled the film's jarring conclusion.

The Soviet leadership struggle following Stalin's death was the last one to feature murderous mayhem as default strategy. When Khrushchev was overthrown by Brezhnev in 1964, he was retired, not killed. Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko died of illness and old age. The plotters against Gorbachev in 1991 placed the last Soviet leader under flabby house arrest, and folded like a house of cards when Yeltsin rallied support against the coup.

Then there's Molotov, played superbly by Michael Palin in the film. He survived all the preceding luminaries save only Gorbachev, and died peacefully in hospital in 1986 at the age of 96.

I cannot recommend this film highly enough. In the context of my admittedly narrow tastes, it's a masterpiece.

Review: The Slapstick Horror of ‘The Death of Stalin’, by Manohla Dargis (New York Times)

The comedy of cruelty is rarely funnier or more brutal than when it comes from Armando Iannucci, a virtuoso of political evisceration. A comic talent who should be household famous, he is best known for “Veep,” the HBO series about Washington politics that was a satire when it first hit in 2012 but now seems like a reality show. He also directed the movie “In the Loop,” an aptly obscene burlesque about the run-up to the Iraq War. He only seems to have abandoned contemporary politics in his latest, “The Death of Stalin,” an eccentric comic shocker about a strong man and his world of ashes and blood.

The laughs come in jolts and waves in “The Death of Stalin,” delivered in a brilliantly arranged mix of savage one-liners, lacerating dialogue and perfectly timed slapstick that wouldn’t be out of place in a Three Stooges bit. Turning horror into comedy is nothing new, but Mr. Iannucci’s unwavering embrace of these seemingly discordant genres as twin principles is bracing. In “The Death of Stalin,” fear is so overwhelming, so deeply embedded in everyday life that it distorts ordinary expression, utterances, gestures and bodies. It has turned faces into masks (alternately tragic and comic), people into caricatures, death into a punch line.

The movie opens in early March 1953. The iron-fisted Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), 74, has ruled the Soviet Union for decades and racked up countless crimes against humanity and millions of victims. A near-monosyllabic thug with a helmet of steel-gray hair and a retinue of flatterers — Khrushchev and Molotov are among the names crowding this familiar roll call — Stalin likes classical music and old westerns, a casual reminder that barbarism and civilization are often partners in crime. Squirreled away in a dacha, a relatively modest woodland retreat at a remove from the Kremlin, Stalin kicks back with his toadies only to fall grievously ill later that same evening.

He briefly hangs on, gasping but mute, throwing his nominal comrades in arms into a fast-spiraling panic. The most appealing, or rather the least obviously terrible, of these is Khrushchev (a superb Steve Buscemi), the minister of agriculture and a cunning, outwardly drab schemer. Like a seasoned standup, Khrushchev tells his wife which of his jokes made Stalin laugh, an accounting that she dutifully preserves for future reference. When he learns that Stalin has taken ill, Khrushchev hastily pulls a jacket and pants over his pajamas and rushes to his side, where Beria (Simon Russell Beale, brilliant), the head of the secret police, the N.K.V.D., has already taken up position and begun plotting ...

Red has-beens and Reisz: "Seeing the beauty in Ukraine’s Soviet architecture."

Perhaps the single most noteworthy fact to emerge from the recent Reisz Mahal city hall relocation boondoggle was councilman David Barksdale's enduringly bizarre assertion that government employees in an air-conditioned, electrified and fully plumbed building younger than him are being forced to endure "inhumane" working conditions.

That's a special kind of stupid, so let's move to the second most interesting fact, which pertains to the City-County Building itself.

The courthouse is undoubtedly modern, but at 57 years old it’s actually eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Preservationists routinely plead that their overarching goal is not to recreate century-old streetscapes in the sense of Disney-fried fantasy, and there is occasional merit to their protests.

Well, at least for some of them.

Barksdale's cost-be-damned Reisz fetish has marginalized the local historic preservation cadre so thoroughly that its only hope is the elevation of Jeff Gahan as mayor-for-life; any other result in next year's mayoral race stands to be grim for a group that has leaped full-bore into grubby partisan politics in spite of its rumored non-profit, apolitical status.

Returning to the wider scene, where the proverbial rubber ultimately will meet the road is the projected future juncture of preservation-mindedness and structures precisely like the current City-County Building.

We'll be watching. I suspect it won't happen in Barksdale's time, but maybe Generation Z will bail us out of the rampant foppery.

Seeing the Beauty in Ukraine’s Soviet Architecture, by Karim Doumar (CityLab)

The authors of an upcoming book on the nation’s most threatened buildings have a dramatic short film that makes a case for preservation.

За нашу дружбу! All the best to Allan Gamborg and his revamped Soviet Digital Art website.

Regular readers will recall that over the years, I've repeatedly doffed my уша́нка (ushanka -- it's the furry cap) in the general direction of Allan Gamborg.

It's hard to believe 31 years have passed since I first met Allan, Kim Andersen and Kim Wiesener during the rambunctious summer of '87. These three Danes of the apocalypse have been artfully weaving in and out of my travel narratives ever since, as during this famous escapade (in Allan's own words):

For example, I still think of the evening in that Belgian beer place (2000?), where all got complete rat-assed and the party just dissolved in utter chaos.

Ah, those were the daze.

Allan has lived in Moscow for 20 years or so, and somewhere around his third or fourth career in the workaday world, he assumed yet another identity: Purveyor and advocate of Soviet-era art and artists. You need not have an opinion about Vladimir Putin, or be a dirty rotten Commie, to enjoy Allan's web site. You merely must appreciate art.

Dear Friends,

I am happy to announce a brand new version of our website with Soviet Fine Art and graphics and posters - www.digitalsovietart.com

We have an improved design, new functions, better usability, and also full mobile support for all your devices.

The site is also true bilingual now – both in English and Russian (теперь и на русском языке)

Please enjoy – and do let me know if you have any comments -))

Very best wishes,

Allan

Here's the full story.

This website is dedicated to Soviet Art and Socialist Realism in the 20th century. We feature a large number of Soviet and socialist fine arts and posters as well as applied arts and design of that period.

The artists featured were active in the Soviet Union from the 1920s through the 1970s, and their works cover Russian avant-garde, socialist realism as well as the non-official underground art of the 1960s and 1970s.

The collection contains Soviet fine arts, mural designs, graphics, prints and USSR posters, and a unique assortment of applied arts, textile and fashion designs, and tapestries of the 1950s and 1960s. We also show a number of theater designs, including costumes, set designs and curtains. Another specialty of the gallery is children's book illustrations of the 1950s and 1960s.

Thematically, we often focus on Soviet art works and posters telling stories about people and their city or village, work, industry, culture, politics, and works of art illustrating the era and its history as a whole. Specific topics include Soviet agriculture, sports, theater and ballet.

The artists featured were taught by the most famous artists of the late 19th and the early 20th century, and studyed at the most prestigious art schools of the Soviet Union at the time: The VKhuTeMas, the Polygraphical Institute, the Surikov Institute, the Repin Institute, the MIPIDI, and the Moscow Textile Institute.

Most artists featured led a “double” artistic life. On the one hand, they were all members of the state controlled Artists’ Union, being on the state budget of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, producing Soviet art works in support of Soviet ideology, socialist realism, propaganda posters, etc. On the other hand, they took every opportunity to paint for themselves, i.e. painting themes and in styles they personally preferred. Working on genres such as landscape, cityscape and still-life was a manifestation of artists' independence from official ideology.

Many of these works of art were lost to the dust of artists' studios. Here we aim at showing both aspects of the artists’ works.

30 years ago today: The drinking lamp is lit in Riga and Vilnius.

Previously: 30 years ago today: Queuing for kvass (an aside).

In Riga, we happened upon a collection of ridiculously youthful soldiers and photographed them being photographed.

In 1987, theoretically, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics operated just as the name implies, as a voluntarily linked union of constituent republics.

The Republics of the Soviet Union or the Union Republics (Russian: союзные республики, soyuznye respubliki) of the Soviet Union were ethnically based proto-states that were subordinated directly to the Government of the Soviet Union ...

... In the final decades of its existence, the Soviet Union officially consisted of fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs).

In 1991, this theory was proved to be rubbish; when central authority dissolved, the republics hit the road as fast as their declarations of independence would allow them.

Our tour group's next two destinations were Riga and Vilnius, the capital cities of Latvia and Lithuania, which were SSRs -- except in 1987, it wasn't that simple. In fact, it was very complicated.

However, most of the international community did not consider the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) to have legitimately been part of the USSR. The Baltic states assert(ed) that their incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1940 (as the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian SSRs) under the provisions of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was illegal, and that they therefore remained independent countries under Soviet occupation.

This persistent legal position on the part of the three Baltic Republics, which are culturally distinct and speak different languages, finally bore fruit when the USSR collapsed.

Until this happened, naked Kremlin power trumped their claims, and these countries were subject to direct (and oppressive) Soviet rule for a half-century, unlike the indirect control exerted on Eastern European "buffer" states like Hungary and Czechoslovakia -- both of which the USSR invaded when indirect means weren't sufficient.

To dilute ethnic and cultural homogeneity in the Baltic Republics, there was ethnic cleansing following the war. The Red Army sent remaining Germans (and Poles) west; of course the Jewish population had been decimated. Ethnic Russians were moved in, and their presence remains an issue today.

Overall, it made for delicate interplay with our Latvian and Lithuanian guides, and those local students with whom we met according to the usual regimented "official" program. They were carefully screened and expected to toe the literal party line, though in private, discrete opinions at times might be voiced. Beer was found to assist candor.

Our short tour schedule in Latvia and Lithuania went like this:

Saturday 4 July
Evening flight from Leningrad to Riga, overnight in Riga

Sunday 5 July
Overnight in Riga

Monday 6 July
Riga, with a daytime train ride to Vilnius (overnight in Vilnius)

Tuesday 7 July
All day and overnight in Vilnius

Wednesday 8 July
All-day train ride from Vilnius to Warsaw, Poland

That's a lot of movement, and the party schedule escalated; Latvia and Lithuania are traditional beer-drinking countries, and the Beriozka shops were well-stocked with Carlsberg and Pilsner Urquell. There was local beer, but at this point it became easier to be foreigners.

I regret this. So it goes.

Riga is a venerable Hanseatic port city, and the "old" architecture noticeably characteristic of the Baltic Sea and northerly climes.

The Hotel Daugava in Riga had seen better days, and was barely functional. However, our multi-bed room had a balcony, even if the plumbing worked only sporadically. We created a plaque from cardboard and magic marker, dubbing the bathroom the "V. I. Lenin Memorial Shithouse."

Two nights in Riga, two nights in Vilnius, and the drinking spiraled completely out of control. The like-minded had long since coalesced, and as noted, alcohol was cheap and easy. The next few photos were taken by Kim Wiesener, our group leader, who graciously agreed to spiral with us.

This photo always makes me smile. Barrie and I excepted, these seven people hadn't known each other ten days earlier. 30 years on, I've managed to account for all but two of them.

It will be noted that I'm wearing the same shirt in each photo. The photos were taken at different parties in Riga and Vilnius.

There's an explanation, and it's actually true.

I'd been on the road for two months when I met the tour group, subsisting on not too many clothes, washed as often as possible with Woolite, and dried by the sun.

Barrie packed a huge military surplus duffel bag with surplus wearables, determined to do as little laundry as possible by trashing his dirty clothes. He'd been working at a fast food taco franchise called Zantigo, and had brought numerous t-shirts.

As he trashed them, I grabbed a couple; washed and dried, they were a bit large on me at the time, but I was happy to have something different to wear.

I did not attempt to rescue his used underwear.

The clock tower in Vilnius (above) reads "peace" in Russian, not Lithuanian. Below, also in Vilnius, Barrie hoists another case of Carlsberg to the Hotel Narutis.

Next: The legendary train ride from Vilnius to Warsaw, and the Greimans.

30 years ago today: Good morning, Moscow.

Mr. Ottersbach, I presume?

Previously: ON THE AVENUES: Train Whistle Reds, or my journey from Budapest to Moscow by rail in June, 1987.

I've been telling the story of my European travels in 1987. Trust me, I know that it's dry reading in places. You had to be there, right?

Still, this is a blog, and I'm allowed to create the equivalent of a lengthy post-it note before it all dissipates from memory.

It was June 28, 1987.

After 36 hours mostly seated on a train, confined to a stuffy compartment and the adjoining minimalist leg-stretcher of a corridor ... having consumed enough Hungarian salami and Soviet hot tea to last through Thanksgiving, this being a holiday unheard of in the nominally atheistic USSR, there was something highly liberating about finally bounding out onto a sparsely populated platform at Moscow's Kiev Station on the morning of June 28, 1987.

That's right, liberating -- at least in a spatial sense, if not politically. A cursory glance at the map I'd purchased in Budapest unhesitatingly revealed the vastness of the capital city of the Soviet Union, home to 8,000,000 or more at the time. It became all too quickly evident that if infamous emperors and dictators (Bonaparte, Hitler) hadn't been able to conquer Moscow, neither would I.

Moreover, as an American, redolent of the Reaganesque polemical taint, I found myself arriving in the belly of the supposed beast. Mikhail Gorbachev's diplomacy notwithstanding, the USSR remained the evil empire, even if individual Russians almost unfailingly proved to be friendly.

Fortunately, my visit to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1985 provided sufficient evidence that citizens of the USSR were not space aliens. I had this knowledge going for me, although Moscow's pulsating sprawl was a decidedly different tempo than the arguably more cosmopolitan though measured Baltic city.

All these preliminary musings aside, the budget traveler's credo remained intact. My first imperative was to establish base camp, and only then extend the perimeter. It meant locating the hotel where I'd be meeting the tour group later that day.

Whether the bureaucracy there would allow me to register ahead of the group was a bridge yet to be crossed.

So, where the hell was I going?

There was an address for the Hotel Molodjezhny, but directions were left to my own calculations, hence the Hungarian tourist map. I might have hailed a taxi, and probably could have paid for it in dollars; by the time of my return in 1989, I knew to pack tubes of toothpaste for such contingencies. As matters stood, public transportation seemed a viable and crazily inexpensive option.

Moscow Metro (subway) tickets cost mere kopecks (cents to the ruble) -- perhaps a nickel each. I stumbled through the act of buying a handful of them, then got to the task of deciphering a system map. I'm not certain if the station names are the same as then, so my route today would be as follows.

Begin at Kievsky Rail Station: Ки́евский вокза́л
Change lines at Arbatskaya: Арбатская
End at Timiryazevsyaka: Тимиря́зевская

There were no English language equivalents, just the Russian. While not as daunting as Mandarin or Arabic, the Cyrillic alphabet was certainly mysterious. I'd already experienced it in Serbia and Bulgaria, though probably it was familiar to Americans of the period (if at all) solely from the letters СССР on Olympic hockey jerseys.

They stood for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. "C" is S; "P" is R. As a side note, recall that in theory, the USSR was composed of nominally autonomous republics (Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, etc). In practice, the USSR was centralized and highly bureaucratic. Moscow was the lynch pin of it all.

I learned that Russian words are far easier to pronounce once you've learned the Cyrillic alphabet. There are Russian letters that require multiple Latin (Roman) letters in transliteration to indicate the same sound. Knowing the Cyrillic letters doesn't imply you'll know what the words mean, but when it comes to deciphering the subway diagrams, it's an invaluable tool.

In the aftermath of my brief Leningrad excursion, I'd resolved to learn the alphabet and a few simple words. I'm proud of myself that I did so, and it came in quite handy in Moscow.

The Cyrillic script is named after Saint Cyril, a missionary from Byzantium who, along with his brother, Saint Methodius, created the Glagolitic script. Modern Cyrillic alphabets developed from the Early Cyrillic script, which was developed during the 9th century in the First Bulgarian Empire (AD 681-1018) by a decree of Boris I of Bulgaria (Борис I). It is thought that St. Kliment of Ohrid, a disciple of Cyril and Methodius, was responsible for the script. The Early Cyrillic script was based on the Greek uncial script with ligatures and extra letters from the Glagolitic and Old Church Slavonic scripts for sounds not used in Greek.

My initial reaction to Moscow Metro stations was one of utter disbelief. If nothing else about the "worker's paradise" were true, there'd still be these ornate underground transit palaces from the Stalin era, intended to illustrate the superiority of Communism, and without irony, built according to the motto, "Whatever and Whomever It Takes."

Construction on the Moscow Metro began in 1933. The work was done mainly by hand, by miners swinging pickaxes and shovels. Josef Stalin spearheaded the prestigious project to showcase the superiority of socialism. He chose Lazar Kaganovich, the “Iron Commissar,” to oversee construction with utmost ruthlessness.

“The Russian metro system was a truly unique project in the history of urban development when you consider how, when, where, and why it was built. They do, however, have a dark side when you consider much of the labor was forced by a leader who eliminated anyone and everyone who stood in his path or threatened his power.” The system opened in May 15 1935, with some 285,000 people riding it that day. Today, some 9 million people ride on 12 lines that pass through 196 stations.

As of 2017, the Moscow Metro is more than 200 miles long, with more expansion planned. Are the new lines as opulent as the old? Perhaps it's time to go back and find out.

Photo credit: David Burdeny.

The commute took almost an hour, but I successfully located the Hotel Molodjezhny. It was large, ugly and could not be missed. Now came the hardest part, as I'd been warned that interjecting a stray variable into even the simplest task might well result in gridlock.

I'd be asking hotel staff to check me into a room ten or more hours before the group arrived. If my argument fell flat, I might be spending the time guarding my belongings in the hotel bar (surprise -- there wasn't one).

Clutching my sheaf of documentation, I began the search for an English speaker. To this day, I'm not sure what happened, because resistance was very brief, and soon enough I had a key. Although my memory is hazy, the desk may have retained my passport, which was standard operating procedure so they could finish their paperwork in peace.

I had a room and a place to stow my gear. My scant notes suggest I then accompanied "the New Yorkers" to Red Square. I have absolutely no clue what this means. Did we eat and drink? Talk about the Mets?

No idea.

At some point in the afternoon, I changed money with a young man who called himself Bill. Not a common Russian name, Bill. It was a seamless transaction, and he wasn't at all threatening, just on the make -- not sexually, but economically.

Think of Bill as the inadvertent poster boy for Gorbachev's policy of perestroika ... and see ON THE AVENUES on Thursday for the next installment of the tale: Back in the USSR, with my old friend Barr.

Ice cream, to us.

ON THE AVENUES: Train Whistle Reds, or my journey from Budapest to Moscow by rail in June, 1987.

ON THE AVENUES: Train Whistle Reds, or my journey from Budapest to Moscow by rail in June, 1987.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Today's column is one in a linked series of narratives about my 1987 European summer. Previously, I said goodbye to Budapest, and an era now long gone. Next: In the Soviet Union for a "good morning to Moscow."

As though to refute a litany of preconceived notions, the train arrived on time. It eased into Kievsky Station in Moscow at precisely 11:10 a.m. on June 28, 1987, roughly 36 hours after departing Budapest.

Not all of these many moments were spent in forward motion. The border crossing between Hungary and the USSR, bosom fraternal allies bound by the solemnity of the Warsaw Pact, took three full hours in the dead of night at the edge of nowhere between Zahony and Čop.

Saying goodbye to tourist-friendly Hungary was relatively seamless. By contrast, entering the Soviet Union prompted a bout of nervousness. My ream of papers had every appearance of being in order – passport, visa, tour group documents and a pristine $10 bill to change officially for rubles while aboard the train.

After all, upon arrival in Moscow I’d need enough spare change to buy ice cream, vodka and subway tickets. After that the flourishing black market would satisfy my extended banking needs at a far preferable rate of exchange.

When leaving the USSR, one could convert rubles back into hard currency, though only for the exact amount of legal, sanctioned, rubber-stamped transactions. Laundering black rubles wasn’t possible, but I fully intended to get my ten-spot back before passing into Poland in early July.

Meanwhile at the border, there was palpable trepidation. Those Cold War spy tales had left an indelible impression, and not many Americans entered the USSR by rail from Hungary. Furthermore, I didn’t know enough Russian to hold a meaningful conversation with soldiers, whether or not they were carrying guns.

My fears were unfounded during the document check, which went swimmingly. Then a stone-faced Ivan Drago lookalike appeared, wielding grunts and gestures to convey to me that my nifty interior frame backpack should be presented and opened for immediate inspection.

Gazing sternly at my motley collection of belongings, he lifted a t-shirt and found the artfully concealed bottle of marvelous Egri Bikaver wine – and I could have sworn he was suppressing a smile somewhere behind a very stiff upper lip. The border check proceeded quickly and efficiently, and only after it had concluded did one of my two seatmates turn and address me in serviceable English.

There’d have been no compelling reason to make himself look suspicious until the other formalities were concluded.

Perhaps a tad paranoid, though in 1987 it had been only 34 years since Uncle Joe Stalin died, and memories were long.

In 2017, it's been 33 years since Bruce Springsteen released "Born in the U.S.A." -- and memory has ceased to be any factor in our lives.

The primary reason our border stop lasted so long was the need for something called a bogie exchange. It had nothing to do with Casablanca or Lauren Bacall. Simply stated, the standard Soviet rail gauge is wider than the gauge used in both Eastern and Western Europe (with the exception of Spain and Portugal).

Bogie exchange is a system for operating railway wagons on two or more gauges to overcome difference in the track gauge. To perform a bogie exchange, a car is converted from one gauge to another by removing the bogies or trucks (the chassis containing the wheels and axles of the car), and installing a new bogie with differently spaced wheels.

Rather than switch trains, the train switches wheels. In 1987, I must have been asleep and missed it. In 1989, at Brest on the USSR’s border with Poland, I was able to see a bogie exchange up close and personal.

Crews went into the compartments at each end of the railway wagon and detached the outermost passenger seat assembly. Below each of these was a mechanism resembling an oversized cotter pin, which was removed.

The wagon was lifted by the arms of hydraulic jacks and the narrower gauge bogies pushed out, to be replaced by wider ones rolled into position by means of dual tracks. The wagon was lowered, and the cotter pins replaced.

Off we went, back into the USSR.

In practical terms, wider wagons meant just enough extra inches to comfortably stretch my six-foot, four-inch frame to full extension, something rarely enjoyed inside Western European sleeper compartments.

With little else to do, my plan for two evenings on a Soviet train was to sleep as much as possible … and eat, and drink. I’d brought my own victuals from Budapest: a half-kilo of salami, bread, sweets, cherries, apples and wine.

One delightful difference on a Soviet train was overstaffing, with at least two attendants per carriage. At one end of each carriage there was a nook with a built-in samovar, the classic Russian vessel for making tea. Almost any time of day or night, piping hot tea was available for the asking at a ridiculously low price of a few cents American. It came in a real glass, inserted in a podstakannik (подстака́нник), the characteristic metal tea glass holder.

The sunrise on June 27 was unforgettable. We were eastbound in the foothills of the Carpathians, and I shuffled out into the corridor to hug a window and view scenery that reminded me of Wyoming or South Dakota. Soon the heights yielded to the plains and farms of Ukraine, interrupted occasionally by pine woods, and through these landscapes we would continue rolling all the way to Moscow via the historic cities of Lvov and Kiev.

I brought two books, a Russian language instructional text and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There was plenty of time for reading them. I’d taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet, which came in handy when pronouncing words, though less so when I still didn’t know what the words meant.

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This train trip was the centerpiece of my eastern strategy in 1987. I’d prepaid a “youth and student” tour of Moscow, Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Riga and Vilnius (now independent Latvia and Lithuania, respectively) and Warsaw. My old pal Barrie Ottersbach would be joining the tour in Copenhagen, and flying to Moscow with the group.

I’d been on the road for two months, largely incommunicado, and needed to connect to the tour group in Moscow from somewhere in Eastern Europe. I’d learned that booking such an East Bloc connection from the United States was highly problematic, and stupidly expensive whenever possible, but far easier in Western Europe by means of the official government-run travel agencies of the Warsaw Pact countries.

The first month of my trip unfolded in Western Europe, and I diligently procrastinated. Then I was in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and still did nothing. Typically for a last-minute type of guy like me, I waited until all conceivable inexpensive choices narrowed to just one flip of the coin.

Either something or someone in Budapest would sell me a train ticket to Moscow, or I’d be spending more money than I could afford on an airplane ticket.

I began with the ticket windows at Keleti Station and was ingloriously repulsed. Next came multiple locations of IBUSZ (EE-boos), the officially sanctioned national tourist office. Traveling in Communist countries meant developing a forager’s aptitude. The trick was to be persistent; just because one worker said it was impossible didn’t mean the next one wouldn’t be helpful.

In fact, one English-speaking IBUSZ clerk flatly informed me that a train ticket to Moscow simply couldn’t be managed so close to the departure date, still three whole weeks away.

Finally it occurred to me to visit the office of the Hungarian youth and student travel agency, which I believe was called Express. On the one hand, I no longer was a student. On the other, I’d registered for a spring semester class at IU Southeast, found a friendly face in the bursar’s office to verify the application, and then dropped the class with a full refund, though not before obtaining an internationally-recognized student ID from the accrediting agency in New York City.

Lo and behold, the helpful clerk at Express fixed me up lickety-split. It was a morale boost, and I felt extremely worldly for once. A 36-hour train ride with two nights in a three-bedded compartment ultimately cost me less than $25, including the salami, wine and multiple servings of tea.

However, the single most daunting task was yet to come.

I’d given Barrie a date and a window for expecting a phone call for reconfirming our arrangements prior to his departure. Had I been ensconced at the Budapest Hilton, making this call probably would have been easy, but I was a budget traveler sleeping in someone’s guestroom in Obuda and making lots of 15-cent tram rides.

It was generally accepted that in 1987, international phone calls were problematic to the point of insanity at a Hungarian streetside pay phone, even from Budapest, and so on the 22nd of June, one of the tourist offices directed me to a large centrally located telecommunications center where Hungarians queued to speak with the outside world.

It was a cavernous hall with a well-worn counter and numerous semi-private phone booths paneled in old school veneer. At the counter, you handed over the number to be dialed and paid for your fixed call duration. You were given a booth number, which would be called over the loudspeaker when the connection had been made.

It all sounds easy, except that the number 18 in Hungarian is spelled tizennyolc, and pronounced --- how, exactly?

I’d paid the lady, and now all I had to do was find my phone booth when prompted. The next twenty minutes were spent with my phrasebook, drilling the syllables TEEZ-en-yolts over and over again.

But when the speaker finally crackled, “achtzehn” came spilling out. Thank heavens for Frau Leach’s college German; it transpired that the Hungarian woman behind the counter was trying to help a foreigner as best she could, making eye contact to ensure I knew her German even if she didn’t know my English.

Barrie answered, and we coordinated plans in the scant minutes before the connection fizzled and crashed. I didn’t demand a refund.

Karma, after all.

There was a worker’s cafeteria not too far away from the telecommunications center, and it was time for a few of those chilly Borsodi drafts at the low daily price of a quarter each.

I'd be missing Hungary, for sure.

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Recent columns:

June 15: ON THE AVENUES: Hi there, NAHA wastrels. My name is Peter Principle, and these are my friends Deaf and Dugout.

June 8: ON THE AVENUES: Since 2004, "Two way, better way."

June 1: ON THE AVENUES: Take this cult of personality and shove it.

May 25: ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to wherever you are, and come to think of it, Ljubljana will do nicely.

Stalin and the Nazi invasion: "1941 and the Man of Steel."

It's overly simplistic in places; nevertheless, this documentary is a good introduction to the topic.

World War Two: 1941 and the Man of Steel

Marking the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, historian Professor David Reynolds reassesses Stalin's role in the life and death struggle between Germany and Russia in World War Two, which, he argues, was ultimately more critical for British survival than 'Our Finest Hour' in the Battle of Britain itself.

The name Stalin means 'man of steel', but Reynolds's penetrating account reveals how the reality of Stalin's war in 1941 did not live up to that name. Travelling to Russian battlefield locations, he charts how Russia was almost annihilated within a few months as Stalin lurched from crisis to crisis, coming close to a nervous breakdown.

Reynolds shows how Stalin learnt to compromise in order to win, listening to his generals and downplaying communist ideology to appeal instead to the Russian people's nationalist fighting spirit. He also squares up to the terrible moral dilemma at the heart of World War Two. Using original telegrams and official documents, he looks afresh at Winston Churchill's controversial visit to Moscow in 1942 and re-examines how Britain and America were drawn into alliance with Stalin, a dictator almost as murderous as the Nazi enemy.

Bolshie art, and how El Lissitzky got under my skin, though I couldn't afford to keep him there.

El Lissitzky.

My curiosity was aroused when I saw the name of Lazar Markovich Lissitzky. For a while in 2008, his "Lenin Tribune" (above; a Constructivist moving speaker's podium) was a big influence in my thinking about the design for Bank Street Brewhouse.

That's because I was determined to illustrate that when almost every other entrepreneur wants to be in a "historic" building, I'd take the modern one.

Little came of all this, as we had plenty of other bills to pay. But it was a damned fine fantasy while it lasted.

Reds, whites and truths: A century after the Russian revolution, a showcase of its art (The Economist)

At the Royal Academy, a sinister history lurks beyond the frame

ALTHOUGH it marks the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the true inspiration for the Royal Academy’s new exhibition is 1932. In that year, a vast retrospective entitled “Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic” took place in the Russian State Museum in Leningrad. Curated by Nikolai Punin, an avant-garde luminary, it was meant to be the zenith of the radical artistic current that had been growing in Russia for decades. Instead, it was a swansong. Within years, many of the thousands of paintings featured would disappear into hidden store cupboards, trampled beneath the inescapable march of state-backed socialist realism. Punin himself, accused of “anti-Soviet activity”, was to die, starving, in a desolate gulag north of the Arctic Circle.

“Revolution: 1917-1932” covers the same 15 years as Punin’s show. The period has suffered some neglect. The myth goes that in the years after the Bolshevik revolution, bland socialist realism stomped on the avant-garde. In fact, after the revolution but before Stalinism tightened its grip on culture, there was a frenzied gasp of creative brilliance. Artistic, technological and political innovations clashed and co-existed. Kazimir Malevich turned the geometry of suprematism to figurative portraits of peasant farmers. Pavel Filonov would use the kaleidoscope fragments of his “formula” paintings to depict tractor factories. Buildings designed by El Lissitzky riffed on the crooked perspectives of photo-montage, and on the uncompromising functionality of industrial machinery.

Khrushchyovka! The rise and fall of typical Soviet-era housing in Russia.

The video here offers an "upscale" example, based on what I've seen.

Khrushchyovka! Typical USSR Apartment Building. "Real Russia" ep.17

In this video we'll show you how is the famous typical USSR apartment building, known as "Khrushchyovka" looks like and visit my friend Nataly, who lives in one of Khrushchyovka apartments that to show you how it looks like not only outside but inside as well.

"Khrushchyovka" is a type of low-cost, cement-paneled or brick three- to five-storied apartment building which was developed in the USSR during the early 1960s, during the time its namesake Nikita Khrushchev directed the Soviet government.

Hope you enjoy!

Now that you've seen a typical Khrushchyovka ...

Moscow to demolish 8,000 Soviet-era housing blocks

Moscow city authorities are to tear down about 8,000 blocks of flats built in the 1950s and 1960s in a major clearance programme that will involve rehousing 1.6 million people in the coming years, it's reported.

Mayor Sergei Sobyanin told a council meeting on Wednesday that the decision follows a positive review of an earlier, more modest demolition of about 1,700 of the low-rise prefabricated buildings known throughout the former Soviet states as "Khrushchyovkas", Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reports.

Back in 2012, I read a book about manufactured housing in the former Czechoslovakia, and reviewed it in ON THE AVENUES. It is reprinted here.

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The late Vaclav Havel famously referred to them as “rabbit hutches,” and even today, more than two decades after the end of the Communist period, one-third of all Czechs inhabit pre-fabricated, modular housing blocks, particularly ones erected with increasing haste and decreasing art from the 1960’s through the 1980’s.

To stand on Castle Hill in the middle of architecturally glorious Prague and look outward toward the suburbs is to view what first appears to be a gray wall around the city. Actually, the wall is an optical illusion, a composite of these modular housing blocks in seemingly endless rows.

All across the former East Bloc, the Communist period witnessed the construction of high-rise housing units like these, quickly manufactured elemental housing that left travelers with an indelible image of a commensurately grim and manufactured life, but as Kimberly Elman Zarecor explains in her book, “Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960”, the story was at least a bit different there.

Because Czechoslovakia was the industrial heartland of the deceased Austro-Hungarian Empire, its income levels and educational attainment were above the norm during the period between the wars. Avant-garde and modernist schools of architecture in German, Scandinavia and France were represented by Czechoslovak architects in their projects of the time, and overall, the future seemed bright for the country’s development as a stable, liberal democracy.

Successive Nazi and Soviet occupations deferred this dream for almost a half-century, with a lasting and sometimes quite ugly contribution to the area’s physical landscape.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, with a pressing need for housing reconstruction, and amid the forced imperative to organize the economy according to Communist principles of heavy industry, Czechosolvak architects fought gamely, for the most part as socialist loyalists, to retain their interwar aesthetic. There were some initial successes, but their influence steadily declined as Communist rule tightened and five-year production quotas submerged all other considerations.

After Stalin’s death put an end to the worst excesses of enforced socialist realism, which in practice meant emulating the Soviet dictator’s grandiose, leaden, Commie Gothic personal tastes, housing in Czechoslovakia became an exercise in the rapidity of modular manufacturing, with assembly-line construction far more utilitarian than any purpose-designed building, and on the cheap, with sloppily pre-cast concrete panels bolted together in stacks as high as engineering principles permitted.

Manufactured housing in Communist Czechoslovakia may have been inevitable, but Zarecor deftly shows that the route from free-form blueprint to rabbit hutch was more winding than commonly assumed, even if the end results were the same. What will the outskirts of Prague look like in twenty more years? I can only hope I’m still around to return there, and to experience the visceral reaction at another, perhaps less jarring, time.

ON THE AVENUES 2013 THROWBACK: "Anachronisms and intellectuals, here and there," or the local Democratic Party's prospects for rejuvenation, then as now.

Throwback photo, too.

ON THE AVENUES 2013 THROWBACK: "Anachronisms and intellectuals, here and there," or the local Democratic Party's prospects for rejuvenation, then as now.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Way back on March 3, 2013, the Floyd County Democratic Party's central committee issued a press release celebrating its new officers, as chosen and installed during the party's "quadrennial" reorganization.

Three weeks later (March 28, 2013), I asked whether we should care. If anything, my conclusion was too optimistic.

With another quadrennial party milestone (millstone?) looming, just look how matters have digressed. In three election cycles since the leadership change, the party has managed only the re-election of Jeff Gahan, who has proceeded to act in defiance of the party's stated core values.

Floyd County government has been completely lost, and city council Democrats are reduced to tenderly massaging Dan Coffey's serial bigotry to maintain a semblance of control.

In Floyd County, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton 60% - 40%, and currently Gahan has enthusiastically adapted Trumpian techniques to wage war on the city's poor. The increasingly undemocratic Democratic party is absolutely silent, preferring to look past the accumulating rubble to a template-driven, sanitized, Disney-fried future, one apparently able to be implemented only by means of rampant corruption and fiscal irresponsibility, as enacted by appointed boards to the exclusion of elected officials -- because obviously, Democrats in Floyd County no longer trust the electorate.

Through it all, the central committee keeps issuing cheery memes. As such, the party isn't just being hypocritical. It's disemboweling itself, and while that's fine with me, I'd prefer to at least see evidence of a pulse before the crackup.

Now let's return to March, 2013, and see how I did.

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ON THE AVENUES: Anachronisms and intellectuals, here and there (March 28, 2013)

Francis Spufford’s novel is Red Plenty. The story takes place in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev era, a time when ever so briefly, it appeared as though the USSR’s planned economy would make good on its promise of economic paradise. In fact, Khrushchev himself provided a firm date for the fruition: 1980.

(It didn’t happen, but you already knew that)

A narrator appears at the beginning of each of the novel’s main sections, providing a non-fictionalized background of historical events. The passages combine to serve as a concise Soviet era refresher course for those unfamiliar, and this is good, because nowadays, the USSR is fading from view everywhere in the world save for the deeper recesses of Vladimir Putin’s subconscious.

In the following excerpt, it is explained what occurred in Russia when the Bolsheviks were victorious in the Civil War, but found themselves still at odds with a distinctly Russian intellectual tradition, one actively opposing the Tsar, yet not necessarily welcoming the Bolshevik triumph.

The Bolsheviks had been having trouble with the old kind of intellectual ever since the revolution. The tiny professoriat they inherited – a fraction of an educated class which was itself a small fraction of Russia’s literate minority – was shaped by an ethical tradition more than a century old. Pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals felt a sense of public obligation not shared by their equivalents abroad. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had been obvious to anyone educated that the tsarist regime was an embarrassing, oppressive anachronism. To be one of the lucky few who could read about the world outside therefore gave you a responsibility to try and do something about Russia; usually not in a directly political way, unless you were one of those with a very pronounced bump of idealism, but by building up an alternate Russia in culture, in novels and poetry and art where stupidity was not enthroned. Above all, to be an intellectual was to feel that you were, at least potentially, one of those who spoke truth to power. By teaching and learning at all, you were implicitly acting as a witness, as a prophet of a larger life.

Before going any further, exactly what is an intellectual?

An intellectual is a person who primarily uses intelligence in either a professional or an individual capacity. As a substantive or adjective, it refers to the work product of such persons, to the so-called "life of the mind" generally, or to an aspect of something where learning, erudition, and informed and critical thinking are the focus …

The real question is this: What happens when the life of the mind meets the daily reality of politics, which has been defined as “who gets what, when, and how”?

In Spufford’s novel, a flowering of youthful idealism in the USSR after the tyrant Stalin’s death shows signs of evolving into a skilled, influential – yes, even intellectual – force for change, one not seen since in the country since before the famine, purges and World War II, but ultimately the Communist Party’s domineering inertia proves far too entrenched to be dislodged. Intellectuals prove no match for bureaucratic time-servers whose governing habits are fixed, and self-interests pre-eminent.

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So, what happens in New Albany when the life of the mind meets the daily reality of “politics as usual” … specifically, more years than not, of Democratic Party politics as usual?

Now, I’m not about to suggest a Soviet scenario from the age of Khrushchev is a perfect analogy with the decades-long political stalemate in New Albany.

At the same time, there are distinct similarities as they pertain to those of us hereabouts seeking to speak truth to power and prophesying a larger life – in short, those commonly finding themselves marginalized by the local Party’s fixed governing habits and traditionally insular self-interests.

Perhaps the common thread linking Russian Tsarism, Soviet Communism and our locally dysfunctional two-party political duopoly (Democrats as hegemonic in New Albany, Republicans in Floyd County) is that each one of them operated, or in our case continues to operate, in such a manner as to make it absolutely necessary for anyone capable of independent thought to reject their non-creative bureaucratic tendencies, and to seek instead alternate cultures where Spufford’s “stupidity” is not perpetually enthroned.

And, just as many Russian intellectuals regarded Communism as scant improvement on Tsarist rule, educated and progressive New Albanians understand that while the Democratic Party is largely inert and unresponsive, with year after year of underachieving gridlock in spite of 8-1 Democratic council majorities with sitting Democratic mayors, Republican Party rule would be Philistinism of an even more mind-numbing and pervasive variety.

Hence, the tendency of New Albanian intellectuals to seek refuge in the cool embrace of Progressive Pints.

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Paraphrasing Spufford, “New Albany’s local Democrats have been having trouble with the intellectuals ever since LBJ lost the South.”

Given the Dixiecratic, ward-heeling tendencies of a local Democratic Party so long ensconced – so firmly enamored of right-wing Heavrinist twaddle that when Doug England anointed a longtime Republican named Irv Stumler to succeed him as Democratic mayor, it took weeks for anyone on the inside of the machine to get the joke, and they still didn’t – I find myself annually tolerating the Democratic Party’s municipal stranglehold as the only alternative to future Republican jihad, while not exactly popping corks at the sclerotic inability of Democrats to innovate during times that have fairly demanded agile improvisation.

Indeed, England’s colossal (and hilarious) Stumler miscalculation in 2011 provided a rallying point for the candidacy and eventual electoral success of Jeff Gahan, but significantly, the argument then was not about platforms and policies. Rather, it concerned who was a member of which club, and who was not. The minuscule differential in substance between the two intra-party camps was inconsequential, and moot still ruled.

My point: Forget the –isms. In the USSR, an entrenched and elephantine Communist Party could not make reform possible until it collapsed of its own weight, a quarter-century after Khrushchev’s sloppy ouster.

In New Albany, are we fated to endure the parallel track, remembering that Gorbachev’s “reforms” in the USSR (glasnost, perestroika) were far too little, way too late?

Accordingly, should our native intelligentsia celebrate the local Democratic Party’s recent turn toward new leadership?

To be sure, they’re younger and brighter than before. Some of them might actually have voted for Barack Obama, and are willing to defy the odds by openly admitting to it. Verily, one cannot entirely dismiss hope, however naïve, that the local Democratic Party will cease being a Tsarist-style anachronism, especially in the absence of any semblance of coherent Republican counterweight – itself, as always, a far less savory specter of dim-witted theocratic fascism than Democratic stasis.

But I will tell you this, and with considerable pride: I have no apologies whatsoever for harboring progressive inclinations and intellectual leanings … no regrets for witnessing, reading, thinking, dreaming, speaking truth to what passes for power and pointing to the possibility of a larger civic life in New Albany. After all, there is a noble progressive political and ethical tradition to uphold, even here in battered New Albania, and we remain hard at work “building up” the alternate culture. If we don’t, who will?

The local Democratic Party may or may not have noticed any of this, and if it has, comprehension may as yet be lacking.

But does that really matter?