Buran: Whatever Happened to You?

Remem­ber one of the most remark­able mas­ter­pieces of Soviet engi­neer­ing? Despite only hav­ing made one flight, it is still con­tinue to fas­ci­nate peo­ple across the globe — and She still intends to con­tinue doing so…

buran as ir 500x354 Buran: Whatever Happened to You?

The beauty of the beast

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Calendar of 1964: Us and Them.

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 at some Soviet artist’s work.

It would have been a brief post, so we thought we’d include the major achieve­ments of these great men.

001w26gh1 370x500 Calendar of 1964: Us and Them.

Movie Pro­duc­ers: Sergey Eisen­stein & David W Grifith

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Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?

28 500x333 Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?

Image cour­tesy of Léonard Gianadda, a Swiss pho­togra­her who vis­ited Moscow in 1957.


This is prob­a­bly one of the length­i­est and most con­tro­ver­sial top­ics to attempt, yet it is very impor­tant for our blog to  answer — or at least to raise  this ques­tion. If you have been fol­low­ing us for a lit­tle while, you would know that by mid 1980s the atmos­phere in Rus­sia was tense. The mir­a­cle of doing well in the WWII had been wear­ing out. The total deficit of every­thing and the black mar­kets did not con­tribute to keep­ing the morale up. The Cher­nobyl dis­as­ter as well as war action in Afghanistan had drained the coun­try both finan­cially and psy­cho­log­i­cally. The pub­lic resent­ment was grow­ing: the com­mon joke was that you could find truth any­where except in Pravda and the news any­where except in Izves­tia. (both are the Russ­ian news­pa­pers, the first one lit­er­ally mean­ing truth and the lat­ter one – news). For years the gov­ermnent had been run­ning in the red but it did not catch up with them till late 1980s – and it was too lit­tle too late for a change.

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