An old cal­en­dar of 1964 pic­tur­ing a set of remark­able cit­i­zens of the world: a Soviet per­son next to its Amer­i­can coun­ter­part. Sadly there is no anno­ta­tion left to fig­ure what the mes­sage was  —  infor­ma­tive, pro­pa­gan­dist or other, so the faces below are torn out of con­text. But it is still nice to have a look […]

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My iPad has really got me read­ing recently. On iBooks almost all of clas­sic lit­er­a­ture is free, so I am read­ing a book by Arthur Conan Doyle   —  The Adven­tures of Sher­lock Holmes: The Man with the Twisted Lip. There was a pas­sage that struck me as remark­able (or, as Conan Doyle would put it, rather sin­gu­lar):
One […]

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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 […]

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Apart from the Soviet writ­ers’ pro­lific input into the chil­dren lit­er­a­ture, a great deal of sto­ries was trans­lated into Russ­ian, so the kids of the USSR grew up on the sto­ries by Hans Ander­sen, Charles Pier­rot and the Grimm broth­ers. Often the trans­la­tors took the lib­erty of chang­ing the plot of the sto­ry­line: this is […]

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Just like any­where else in the world, the Soviet young­sters wanted to social­ize, to lis­ten to the music and to dance. The night­clubs were unheard of  –  any­thing of that kind would have been announced as pro­mot­ing debauch­ery or morally wrong lifestyle habits. So the best one would hope for were the dis­cothe­ques  –  the spe­cial dance occa­sions, organized […]

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Due to a series of not so for­tu­itous events ( the Great Octo­ber Social­ist Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917, the First World War, the over­all run­down of the young Soviet coun­try) women never had their needs attended to prop­erly. Under­wear was made, first and fore­most, for the work­ing class with no pref­er­en­tial treat­ment for the females so […]

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