Day: April 23, 2015

Maxim Kantor: Colorful Ribbons

Maxim Kantor
Colorful Ribbons
April 22, 2015
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Tell me, what you are proud of?
You didn’t fight, not even your fathers fought.
You basically did nothing at all.
That was seventy years ago, in another country.
And it was completely different people who fought, and they fought for something else.
Ukrainians, Russians, Americans, British, Jews, French, Belarusians, and Tajiks fought shoulder to shoulder then against an empire that wanted to devour the world.

pobeda
And now you are fighting for an empire against the Ukrainians. You are killing your neighbors.
You want to destroy their country.
And you want a decoration for this?
What do decorations from someone else’s victory have to do with this? What does someone else’s war have to do with it?
You are looters. You are bandits. You are imperialists.
Colorful ribbons are pinned to bandits. You think it looks nice?
Take the ribbons off now, don’t disgrace yourselves.

Maxim Kantor is a well-known Russian painter, writer, and essayist.

Photo by The Russian Reader

Fake Finnish Eggs in Russian Stores

In Finnish, hyvää huomenta means “good morning!” (As this package prompts us—in Russian.)
hyvää huomenta eggs-1

There’s nothing like fresh Finnish eggs in the morning.

For those of you who have the good fortune not to be able read either Finnish or Russian, these eggs were, in fact, produced by a company called Volzhanin, Ltd., in the village of Yermakovo in the Rybinsk District of Yaroslavl Region. They were not produced in Finland, however hard the top side of the carton tries to convince us otherwise.

hyvää huomenta eggs-2

In Russian, hyvää huomenta apparently means “screw you!”

The odd thing is that on its website, Volzhanin, Ltd., goes out of its way to boast about its environmentally friendly policies and practices.

Interestingly, you won’t find Hyvää Huomenta eggs on Volzhanin, Ltd.’s list of products.

So this is the kind of three-card monte Volzhanin, Ltd., plays with folks in Petrograd, used to buying food at Finnish chain stores like Prisma, which have set up shop in their city, or making trips across the border and loading up on high-quality Finnish produce before heading back home.

For more on this shady business generally, see Sergey Chernov’s fantastic photo reportage from this past January.