Monthly Archives: January 2010

Slava Kurilov: Alone at Sea. An Unbelievable Way to Escape the Iron Curtain

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kurilov2 Slava Kurilov: Alone at Sea. An Unbelievable Way to Escape the Iron Curtain

The only per­son to escape the Iron Cur­tain by swimming.

By job he was an oceanog­ra­pher, by heart he was a dreamer, by nation­al­ity he was a cit­i­zen of the planet Earth — in short, he was an extra­or­di­nary guy. Yet his per­sonal file in the USSR was stamped as “not wor­thy of an exit visa” so he was not allowed to leave the coun­try, even if it was for a hol­i­day. So in Decem­ber, 1974 he jumped a cruise boat “The Soviet Union” off the coast of the Philip­pines islands — and he swam to freedom.With no food or drink, no swim­ming equip­ment apart from flips and gog­gles, he swam to the shores about a hun­dred kilo­me­ters for three days — com­pletely alone at sea.

Since his child­hood, Slava Kurilov had been very keen on swim­ming and he loved the sea so deeply, he made it his career — he was an oceanog­ra­pher, a deep sea diver. He knew the sky — all the major con­stel­la­tions, he knew mete­o­rol­ogy, he had a vivid inquis­i­tive mind  — he also spoke good Eng­lish, had a sis­ter liv­ing in Canada and his father was in a Ger­man prison camp dur­ing the WWII, which also con­sid­ered some­what of a treach­ery. A few times Slava applied for a per­mit for research trips out­side the coun­try, but to no avail — the rea­son being “endan­ger­ing the secu­rity of the USSR”.

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Military Discharge Handmade Scrap Book and Comics Album

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11 365x500 Military Discharge Handmade Scrap Book and Comics Album

You’re in the army now

The com­pul­sory two years of mil­i­tary ser­vice was a rite of pas­sage for every Soviet guy. When one turned eigh­teen — unless for sick­ness or injury — it was time to be called in for the mil­i­tary life — two years in the bar­racks. Usu­ally away from home, this period of time was meant to train and edu­cate the men should there be a war. It included phys­i­cal train­ing, polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion, cur­rent affairs, weaponry and so on — a good many posts can be writ­ten on life in the army! Today, how­ever, we want to take a dif­fer­ent look on this sub­ject. The guys usu­ally bonded well and dur­ing their spare time cre­ated so called “Dis­charge Albums” — like scrap­books, they were full of pho­tos, songs lyrics, quick notes from the bud­dies etc. This par­tic­u­lar one has a very neat selec­tion of wee hand drawn episodes of the army realities.

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A Rough Guide to Moscow from the Daughter of the American Ambassador

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Joseph E. Davies was the sec­ond Ambas­sador to rep­re­sent the United States in the Soviet Union in 1937 – 1938.

His daugh­ter, the twenty years old Emlen Knight Davies, took some pic­tures of the sur­round­ings. These images, cour­tesy of her pri­vate col­lec­tion, were on dis­play in Moscow for the anniver­sary of the Spaso House — the offi­cial diplo­matic residence.

These 19 images por­tray Moscow in a slightly dif­fer­ent view — the entire pre-war epoch ended was just about to end, and those times, still full of life and char­ac­ter, still look very charming.

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Emlen Knight Davies, at the age of 20 (ish)

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The Fearsome Threesome – Lenin and His Lovebirds

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437px Lenin in Paris Poster Lenin v Parizhe Youtkhevitch Yutkevich Claude Jade 364x500 The Fearsome Threesome – Lenin and His Lovebirds

Paris, city of love, brought them all together. A Russ­ian movie of 1981.

The offi­cial his­tory often misses a very impor­tant and inter­est­ing point in the course of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion – not every­body knows that Vladimir Lenin, a for­mi­da­ble mind behind the Great Octo­ber Patri­otic Rev­o­lu­tion and the leader of all com­mu­nists, had less than straight­for­ward love life – apart from a wife, he had a mis­tress – and not only that, these two women knew each other and got on very well!

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Moscow Winters, Fragments of the 20th Century.

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Here is a fine col­lec­tion of images of Moscow win­ters, dat­ing from 1920s till 1991. Sadly many places por­trayed on these pho­tographs are gone now, just like the Soviet Union itself, yet lest we for­get.  Please read on to see the image of the first set of traf­fic lights in Moscow CBD in late 1930s, which was oper­ated by a spe­cially trained per­son; or the largest fresh­wa­ter out­door  swim­ming pool in the world -  as well as peo­ple, wooden houses, old boule­vards cov­ered with the vir­gin snow.

0 1f292 1f8e2207 XL 500x331 Moscow Winters, Fragments of the 20th Century.

1925. A pri­vate house on the bank of the Tarakanovka river

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Russian Ice Cream In Winter — Bring It On!

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In the USSR, the very first ice cream fac­tory was opened in 1932 — when the Min­is­ter of Food Sup­ply (if trans­lated not too lib­er­ally) Anas­tas Mikoyan vis­ited the United States of Amer­ica and was so impressed with their ice cream, he decided that Rus­sia needed some­thing of the kind. So the ice cream mak­ing tech­nol­ogy and equip­ment were imported and the ice cream sup­ply to all and every­body began. The process was highly reg­u­lated and, indeed, the qual­ity of Soviet ice cream was envi­able. If  in 1932 the total amount of ice­cream pro­duced was about 300 ton, then 10 years later it grew about 270 times — in 1940 there were  82 thou­sand ton of ice cream produced.

habarr 497x500 Russian Ice Cream In Winter Bring It On!

The city of Khabarovsk, 1970.

This num­bers were lost dur­ing the WWII as the fac­to­ries had to cease work — but it quickly recov­ered and by 1950 there was a 20% increase of what was made before.

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