"Legendary" Russian movie studio
Mosfilm is posting some it's most famous films on its
youtube channel. They will be posting 5 new legendary Soviet films per week. They expect to have 200 uploaded by end of year. Most have English subtitles.
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posted by spicynuts
on May 6, 2011 -
16 comments
Mapping Petersburg "..explores the everyday life and the material, political, and literary culture of St. Petersburg
[..] at the beginning of the twentieth century. It maps eleven itineraries through the city with the purpose of creating a palpable sense of life in Russia's late imperial capital on the eve of the 1917 revolution and during the subsequent decade." [
About] [
via]
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posted by peacay
on Apr 6, 2011 -
8 comments
RussianFilter:
Historical Chronicles with
Nikolai Svanidze is an ongoing Russian television documentary series which, starting with 1901, picks out one person per year, every year, of the 100 years of the 20th century in Russia. It's entirely in Russian, of course, but for them as speaks it, it's one fascinating perspective on Russian history, with excellent narration, copious detail, and fascinating interconnections of events, people and places. All of the episodes that are available through Google Video and various other sources, and
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posted by cthuljew
on Aug 30, 2010 -
8 comments
Kommunalka - communal apartments - were begun by the Bolsheviks in Russia at the end of the Russian Revolution to address overcrowding in cities - and also to
punish the bourgeoisie who had previously lived in comfort. Kommunalka were an enduring social experiment, where multiple families were assigned by the state to
live together in close quarters with no expectation of privacy. It was not uncommon for tenants to
spy on each other. Though communism ended in Russia almost two decades ago, Kommunalka
still exist today.
posted by contessa
on Jul 18, 2009 -
18 comments
It stands as one of the more unusual turning points of the Cold War, thanks mostly to the surprise appearance of several naked middle-aged women. Taking The Cure: How a group of British Columbian anarchists inspired democracy in Russia.
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posted by amyms
on May 13, 2008 -
7 comments
Owen Hatherley, has three blogs where he expounds on culture and architecture from an English Leftist perspective,
sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy,
The Measures Taken (which has longer essays than the previous blog) and the group film blog
kino fist. To give you an idea of the range of subjects he covers, here's a sampling of his blogposts:
Towards a Communist Couture? Sartorial Socialism from Huey P Newton to Honecker,
Zuckendes Fleischer (on pre-WWII American cartoons),
Industrial Island Machine - Vorticism and the absence of an English Avant-Garde,
Hurrah for the Black Box Recorder (on songwriter Luke Haines and The Daily Mail),
The Children’s Book as a Revolutionary Object (with a bunch of pictures from Soviet avant-garde children's books),
Architectural Drawings of the 1960s,
Art is a branch of Mathematics (Taylorism and Russian SF classic
We),
Brechtian Productivism in an age of Mechanical Stagnation and
Notes towards an attempted refutation of the 'Associational Fallacy' (on architecture). All of the blogs are heavily adorned with pretty pictures, some not safe for work.
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posted by Kattullus
on Nov 13, 2007 -
7 comments
Dead Road - Museum of Communism in the Open. "It was one of the most ambitious projects of the Stalin era, known as the
'railway of bones'. At least 10 people a day died during the four years of its construction [actually 1947-1953], but unlike most of Uncle Joe's grand designs it was never completed and now sits unfinished in the tundra, an icy road to nowhere." The
transpolar railway was built by labour camps
^ 501 and 503 and construction was stopped after the amnesty following Stalin's death in 1953; 800km, about half, was built. Some sections are currently in operation, but much is abandoned:
depot and locomotives in Dolgoe,
Dolgoe itself,
labour camps,
more spectacular decay. (Previously:
Norilsk, which was supposed to see an extension of the line.)
posted by parudox
on Aug 27, 2007 -
13 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
The Afghan Elvis (with
YouTube clip),
the Soviet Elvis (
played by Tom Hanks),
the French Elvis (now seeking
Belgian citizenship),
the Mexican Elvis,
the Swedish Elvis,
the Filipino Elvis,
the Chinese Elvis,
the Sikh Elvis,
the Japanese Elvis who became a Prime Minister, and other
foreign Elvii.
posted by jonp72
on Aug 21, 2006 -
20 comments
The work of Russian miniaturist Nikolai Syadristy is amazing - sculptures, watercolors, engravings, all mere millimeters in size. It's a shame, however, that the best online galleries for displaying his works are so limited.
This Flash based virtual museum and
this horrendous gallery were the most extensive collections available online. Still, his work is worth suffering through the bad user interface & limited English translation to enjoy, for those who wish to know just how many angeles truly can fit on the head of a pin.
posted by jonson
on Jun 9, 2003 -
4 comments
