The Griboedov Channel. The bridges St Petersburg is so famous for.
By many, St Petersburg (Leningrad in 1924 – 1991) is often considered to be so beautiful due to its architecture of Italian origin. Quite strange to see these fine buildings embellished by the symbols of the Soviet Era. Let’s take a walk around this fine city in the summer almost 30 years ago.
Remember our post about Slava Kurilov, the guy who jumped off the cruise ship near the Philippines islands — and swam to freedom for three consecutive days, completely alone at sea? Our today’s post tells a story just as remarkable — a young Russian surgeon Leonid Rogozov, stranded in Antarctica with the Sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition, in 1961 performs a self-operation: under local anesthesia, surrounded by a bunch of guys whose only experience with medicine was sitting in a dentist’s chair, the 27th years old doctor removes his own appendix.
rogozovappendectomy2
Please welcome our new author Vadim Costyrin with his first but serious post on the present days of those born in the USSR, brought up by the Yeltsin’s coup and now left to seek their national and cultural identity all by themselves.
A performance at a kindergarten.
Once the USSR inspired us with fear, now this country does not exist. We have the big Russia and a lot of small and not so small, whimsical republics, for the right to include which in the sphere of their influence there fight politicians of the superpowers. Together with the Soviet Union we have lost Russians — our antipodes — against whom we willy-nilly matched. It may seem that it is a victory — but Russians want the USSR back, and after only two decades there are much more fears and threats.
In early 1930s without any licensing arrangements the Soviet engineers copied the first limousine car for the Communist party executives. In 1932 six limousines were copied off the American Buick 90L. However, later the factory production line was switched to producing caterpillar tractors,so the limousine business was shifted to Moscow Stalin Factory.
ZIS-101
The car, based on the engine of the Buick and the body copied off the Cadillac, was given another non-poetic name, ZIS — 101. It also had Buick radiator bars.
Once some music composer said that “There are only seven notes which compose all the music in the world. No wodner some songs sound alike”. Undoubtedly, all cars have got four wheels, so plagiarism in the automobile industry is hard to pinch. In this article we deliberately ignore a popular Soviet point of view that a steam locomotive, an airplane and the radio were not invented in Russia. All we attempt here is to make a small digression into the history of Soviet automobile industry in order to identify its origins and its development.
ZIS-110
A Russian philosopher Vasiliy Rosanov once noted that in Russia every single case of wealth originates from theft or extortion. Historically, the economy of the Russian Empire before the 1917 was so deeply integrated into the European economy that the exchange of ideas, something, which now would have been hugely copyrighted, was very common. Like, in 1901 in St Petersburg the carriage factory Freze and the Riga bicycle factory Leitner successfully assembled the French oil engines De Dion Buton as part of Russian carriages. Another factory Aksai in Rostov-on-Don purchased the license for the production of the American Oldsmobile Carved Dash. In 1906 a Russian engineer Boris Lutskoy organised the assembling of Mercedes cars for the Russian market. At last, the main pride of Russia – the automobile Russo-Balt — was made from foreign parts – the chassis with four-cylinder engine was adopted from a Belgian company with a Swiss name Fondu.
1981. “Milk” (rus. Moloko). In the front a woman pushes the blue pram with a ‘window’. It was incredibly difficult to buy this sort of prams in those times.
Milk