The Turn Against Nabokov [newyorker.com] "The author, whose novels thrum with ironic recurrences, might have been perversely pleased with this: thirty-six years after his death and twenty-two years after the fall of the Soviet Union with all its khudsovets, Vladimir Nabokov is, once again, controversial."
posted by Fizz
on Feb 28, 2013 -
44 comments
The Feynman Files. For the first time, FBI records for Dr Richard Feynman
have been released to the public. They document the Bureau's apparent obsession in the 1950's with outing him as a communist sympathizer, and include notations from several background checks as well as interviews with his colleagues, friends and acquaintances.
posted by zarq
on Jun 6, 2012 -
43 comments
Человек с киноаппаратом ("Man with a Movie Camera") is a classic experimental documentary film that was released in 1929. Directed by pioneer Soviet filmmaker
Dziga Vertov, this classic, silent documentary film has no story and no actors, and is actually three documentaries in one. Ostensibly it documents 24 hours of life in a single city in the Soviet Union. But it is also a documentary of the filming of that documentary and a depiction of an audience watching that documentary and their responses. "We see the cameraman and the editing of the film, but what we don't see is any of the film itself."
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Feb 13, 2012 -
26 comments
Diary of a Collapsing Superpower - "Seventeen years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, and two years later the Soviet Union broke apart. More than 1,400 minutes published earlier this month in Russia from meetings that took place behind the closed doors of the Politburo in Moscow read like a thriller from the highest levels of the Kremlin. They reveal Mikhail Gorbachev as a party chief who had to fight bitterly for his reforms and ultimately lost his battle. But in doing so, he changed the course of history and helped bring an end to the Cold War."
posted by Gyan
on Nov 28, 2006 -
32 comments
Following up on a
previous discussion of the goings-on in Ukraine, it's now a CNN front-page story:
Viktor Yushchenko was, in fact, poisoned with dioxin.
"There is no doubt about the fact that Mr. Yushchenko's disease has been caused by a case of poisoning by dioxin," Zimpfer said. "What we can say at this point is that this concentration constitutes an amount which is 1,000 times above the normal levels that you would find in blood or tissue... We have made a final diagnosis as well as an additional diagnosis, that we suspect a cause triggered by a third party. So there is suspicion of third party involvement... We can state that there has been an oral intake," he said, adding that it was not known if it was from eating or drinking.
I am currently smoothing the crinkles out of my tin-foil hat in preparation for its constant use throughout the rest of my life. (Or do you think it works better if it's crinkled?)
posted by logovisual
on Dec 11, 2004 -
28 comments
Victor Serge is one of the missing links in 20th-century history; in at the beginning of the Soviet Union, he saw before almost anyone what a nightmare it was going to be, wrote some prescient books, may have invented the word "totalitarian," knew everybody who was anybody, and was forgotten. Christopher Hitchens
tries to remind us (quote and acknowledgment inside).
posted by languagehat
on Nov 18, 2003 -
6 comments
This article in "The Nation" bemoans the fact that the U.S is dissing its new best friend Russia, and that the recent entente cordiale is under threat.
This article at the the Institute for War and Peace Reporting suggests that the U.S could, perhaps, be a little more selective in choosing its friends.
I have often wondered if the west would have stood for Russia or the U.S.S.R using force on a scale to that which we have recently witnessed in Afghanistan or Chechnya. It looks like they have become our sons of bitches.
posted by Fat Buddha
on Mar 29, 2002 -
3 comments
