• Behind The Iron Curtain: Outdoor Propaganda In The USSR

    I wrote previously the propaganda surrounding the Soviet people at all the usual and unusual places. People nostalgically musing about the “olden days” when there was practically no outdoor advertisement in the USSR, forget about all the hammers and sickles, red banners, communist party slogans and whatever else was supposed to inspire us to keep building, fulfilling, laboring and rejoicing.
    A recently posted set of photos taken by a Western tourist in the 1984 USSR has some great examples of the ubiquitous outdoor propaganda in Moscow and Leningrad. I added some translations to the photos that needed explanation and I recommend you take a minute to flip through the rest of the set in the slide-show at the end of this post.

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  • Johnson County,KS: Then and Now

    I  had an idea for this post for some time and what could be a better day to do this when Kansas City is swirling with football news (it’s like someone was just waiting for years to pull the trigger and update Wikipedia) and it’s cold as hell (and I know cold) so I am not about to go outside to snap some photos.

    Looks like Kansas School for the Deaf – the birthplace of the football huddle maintains the most complete set of annual pictures of their football team. In today’s issue I will post some photos to trace the evolution of their uniforms (yes, there is evolution in Kansas, you just have to know where to look).

    Note: I took a shortcut here and bypassed lots of uploading/linking, so all the photos link back to the search results.

    1899

    1899

    1900

    1900

    1901

    1901

    1911

    1911

    1914

    1914

    1919

    1919

    1927

    1927

    1931

    1931

    1946

    1946

    1948

    1948

    1952

    1952

    1961

    1961

    1968

    1968

    1982

    1982

    2006

    2006

    This look at the past was brought to you by the Kansas City Lunch Spots : Celebrating 100’s meaningful post.
    Also sponsored by: The Weather: It’s Frightful
    Additional financing by: My Job: I am still employed!

    Previous posts here.

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  • Behind the Iron Curtain:Chernobyl

    On this day 22 years ago Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded and became the world’s worst nuclear disaster. I don’t have much of a Chernobyl personal story. It happened right before the May Day when we were looking forward to a weekend of camping and drinking. Soviet Government did not even acknowledge the disaster and obviously didn’t know how to deal with it, so all the information was coming in the form of rumors and Voice of America shortwave broadcasts. Some unconfirmed whispers about a fire on a nuclear power plant did not stop us from spending few careless days in tents around the campfire. It was literally the wind direction that decided who will be affected by the fallout. My friends and me were among the lucky ones, wind blew in the opposite direction. There are few people in Kansas City who were drafted to work on the site clean-up and decontamination. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who were affected in various degrees. Nowadays, there are plenty of pictures of the ghost town which is still stuck in 1986 and tours of the disaster area are freely available. The eerie images from the 30 km zone would make a suitable background for the final scene of the Planet of the Apes. Just like the destroyed Statue of Liberty in the movie it stands as a reminder of a good intentions gone bad, government inefficiency and lack of caring for the people, and heroism of the simple people in the face of unknown and deadly force.
    More information is available here.

    Chernobyl,
    Reactor is still going,
    Still taking lives.

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  • Behind the Iron Curtain: Moscow 1960’s

    I don’t suppose many of you are browsing Russian blogs, so I thought I’d link some interesting pictures. The source is here and here is a Google translation. I also added some related links in case you are wasting time at work.

    Red Square

    Manezhnaya Square. Hotel “Moscow”

    Central Lenin Museum. State Historical Museum

    The old building of Moscow State University

    Mayakovsky Square and monument to VV Mayakovsky

    Pushkin Square

    Kutuzovsky Prospect

    Building Museum Battle of Borodino panorama

    Swimming Pool “Moscow”. This pool was build instead of planned Palace of Soviets which was supposed to replace the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour,presently restored on the same spot.

    House of Friendship with the Peoples of foreign countries

    V.I.Lenin State Library of the USSR

    Karl Marx Prospect with the monument to Karl Marx

    Sverdlov Square. Bolshoi Theater.

    Gorky Central Park of Culture and Recreation

    Andrei Rublev Museum(formerly Andronikov Monastery)

    Planetarium

    Chkalov Street

    Komsomolskaya Square

    Monument to the worker and a farmer woman. She is holding a sickle and he has a hammer. Hammer and sickle-get it?

    Monument in honor of the Space Development

    Dzerzhinsky Square

    Moscow City’s Palace of Pioneers and schoolchildren

    Student dormitories Patrice Lumumba University.

    South-West Suburbs

    Lomonosov Prospect

    Leninsky Prospect.Public is greeting Cosmonauts returning from space.

    Leninsky Prospect. Department store “Moscow”

    Borodino Battlefield

    Church of the Ascension in Kolomenskoye (XVI century)

    Highway Circling around the city.

    Domodedovo Airport

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  • Behind The Iron Curtain:Hitching a Ride

    Recent post by Scott Adams described his vision for the future of public transportation in the new economy.

    Suppose the government enacted laws that made it legal for anyone to be a taxi driver in his own car without a special taxi license. And suppose the income was non-taxable. The result would be cheap taxis and high availability. Every time you wanted to run an errand, and had an extra minute, you could choose to pick up a rider and cut your own driving expense in half. Technology will make it easy to match amateur taxi drivers with riders. And the market would keep prices low.

    This is very similar to the system that existed for years (and still alive an well) in the USSR and countries that followed it. In addition to pretty well developed system of public transportation and state-owned taxis, a person could just stand on the street, raise a hand and flag down a private car. Both sides benefited equally: a passenger received a semic0mfortable ride for a price comparable to a cab (general price/distance ratio was common knowledge) and a driver made some extra money without making any extra effort. Some people liked it so much that they made it into a part-time job. Others just picked up passengers on the way home or wherever.

    Imagine yourself standing somewhere on the Lenin Street (each city had one of these), you raise your hand and soon one of these beauties stops to pick you up:


    Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

    Soviet Union had its own “Big 3”: GAZ, AutoVAZ, and AZLK; ZAZ in Ukraine produced some of the ugliest and the most unreliable even by the Soviet standards vehicles. Due to the shortage of cars and years-long waiting lists people were happy to get anything with wheels. Sometimes, when at the end of the month autoworkers were rushing to fulfil quotas so they can get their bonus, a lucky buyer would find a bucket of uninstalled parts inside his new vehicle. Despite these cars being 20-30 behind the rest of the automotive world when they came off assembly line, many of them are still on the road closing in on 40 years. Soviet people invented ingenious ways of keeping them going and they turned out relatively easy to fix and maintain.

    My current situation does not easily lend itself to carpooling: I don’t always go straight to work and don’t always drive straight home. The other problem is potential emergency situations that happen rarely but still have to be planned for. In this city I don’t have a reasonable way of getting home from work without my personal vehicle, so I would welcome an opportunity to get a ride from someone who is already headed in the same direction. The only issue  is that when I was growing up© people getting into a stranger’s car were not afraid to be later found in the woods in a block of concrete; drivers were not generally scared of being robbed, killed or raped. Once I hitchhiked almost 200 miles  from where I was stationed in the army to my hometown, changing 5 or 6 cars in the process and never felt any danger; I was wearing my uniform and no one ever asked me for any money. (if some window pops up, just click “return to map”) I don’t know if I would have the same trust now, but if sharing a ride was commonly accepted practice I would probably give it a try.

    If you are ever so lucky to get a ride in an old Soviet Car make sure to try this, it will make you instantly popular:

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