Category: sports

A Holiday in Chernobyl

Watch Kate Brown’s stunning lecture about the real, terrifying aftermath of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant.

Then buy her fabulous, groundbreaking new book Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future and read it from cover to cover.

Once you have done this, ask yourself what kind of cynical lunatics would take people on holidays to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Chernobyl Cooling Tower

Day 5: Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
Friday, July 31, 2020

Leaving early from our hotel, we’ll travel by private bus to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. We’ll meet our Chernobyl guide, while a documentary film playing on the bus will bring us up to speed on the accident, its causes, and its many repercussions. On our first day in Chernobyl we’ll visit the reactors themselves to witness ground zero of the accident, admire the new containment structure installed in 2016, as well as check out some of the other facilities around the nuclear power plant. Between excursions, we’ll take lunch in the Chernobyl workers’ canteen, surrounded by scientists and engineers currently stationed at the plant. Later, after a long day of exploring, dinner will be served at a restaurant in Chernobyl town. Our accommodation for the night is at a hotel nearby, located inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Day 6: The Streets of Pripyat
Saturday, August 1, 2020

At the time of the Chernobyl accident, the workers’ city Pripyat had a population of 49,000 people. It was evacuated soon after the event, and now survives as one of the world’s most famous ghost towns. Today, we’ll get to know this empty city intimately, walking its desolate streets, and visitings its abandoned schools, hospitals, and theaters. We’ll see all of Pripyat’s main landmarks, including the fairground, swimming pools, and also some fabulous street murals. After lunch back at the Chernobyl canteen, we’ll then get to visit one of the Exclusion Zone’s best-kept secrets: the DUGA radar installation, or “Russian Woodpecker,” that rises to a height of 150 meters at the heart of an abandoned Soviet military base. Late in the day we’ll return to the capital for one last night at our Kyiv hotel.

Source: Atlas Obscura. Photo of Chernobyl Cooling Tower by Darmon Richter. Courtesy of Atlas Obscura. Thanks to Louis Proyect for the heads-up on the lecture.

Fulda Gap

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My neighborhood in the former East Berlin harbors some of the last anarchist squats in the city. All the dogs here go for walks without a leash. The odor of marijuana lies heavy in the air. And the sharing economy is practiced as a matter of course.

This means that when someone decides to get rid of something that someone else could use, they often as not set it out on the pavement for the taking.

In this way, several valuable finds have come into my temporary possession.

What I found while we were strolling the neighborhood yesterday, however, was a gift beyond price, and yet it was completely free, to rephrase a line from Rush’s greatest song, “The Spirit of Radio” (1980).

Rush recorded all of their best records during the Cold War, whose moral and intellectual tenor were palpable in Neil Peart’s hippy libertarian fantasy mini-epics, sci-fi short stories, and sonic sermons on the virtues of freedom and individualism.

I was a Rush fan from an early age, but little did I know that as Rush were in Toronto composing and recording the soundtrack of my adolescence, a company called SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.), headquartered on Park Avenue South in Manhattan, was churning out extraordinarily complicated “conflict simulation” games by the hundreds.

Many of SPI’s conflict simulations were based on historical battles and campaigns, ranging from the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Austerlitz to “fantasy & science fiction games” such as Invasion: America—Death Throes of the Superpower and (in the interests of “balance”) Objective: Moscow—The Death of Soviet Communism (“A hypothetical invasion of the USSR by a world coalition”).

Oddly, the first game retailed for $18, while the second cost $27, a decent chunk of money at the time, considering SPI’s target market and the fact that their games consisted of lots of instructions, charts, tables, diagrams, maps, playing pieces, and game boards, all of them printed on cardstock and heavy paper, not on embossed cardboard, etc.

In 1977, when I was ten, and the Cold War informed most of the zeitgeist one way or another, SPI released a remarkable conflict simulation entitled Fulda Gap: The First Battle of the Next War.

Yesterday, I found what looks to be a completely intact, serviceable specimen of Fulda Gap in a cardboard box along with other things clearly left there for the taking by a kindhearted Berliner.

fulda gap-a

My first impression of Fulda Gap is that it is a thousand times more complicated than the actual Cold War was. The “Rules of Play” alone run to sixteen pages.

fulda gap-1.jpg

Fulda Gap also features three sets of “Charts and Tables,” a large folded sheet containing a “Turn Record/Reinforcement Track” on one side, an “Untried Unit Table Analysis” on the reverse, and, of course, a foldout map of West Germany and East Germany where, apparently, the main action takes place and the players pretend, variously, to invade West Germany or fend off the cunning, treacherous Reds.

 

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Finally, Fulda Gap contains what SPI’s mail order catalog of its other games honestly identifies as several hundred “die-cut cardboard playing pieces […] packaged in ziplock bag[s].” The playing pieces are printed with such arcane combinations of numbers, letters, and symbols that it is easier to imagine they have something to do with the Kabbalah than with all-out warfare between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

If I were a contemporary artist I would stage a performance involving Fulda Gap in one of the ex-Cold War settings and current Cold War memorials with which Berlin teems.

If I were a real gamester I would just find a few other comrades, figure out how the game works, and play it.

In any case, I would appreciate your comments, suggestions, and reminiscences about Fulda Gap and SPI’s other remarkable products, as well as information about the company and the people who produced its games. {TRR}

UPDATE (10 May 2020). Reader Steven Lohr has sent me an invaluable comment about SPI and its founder, Jim Dunnigan. Thanks, Steven!

Eat Y’Self Fitter

zeitfur“Time for the girlfriend.”

More bad news from Russia’s Northern Capital:

Количество фитнес–клубов в Петербурге превышает спрос. По данным “ДП” их услугами по–прежнему пользуется небольшая часть населения Северной столицы. В настоящее время в Петербурге спортом в фитнес–клубах регулярно занимаются не более 4,8% населения, в то время как в Лондоне их посещают 20% жителей, в Барселоне — 35%, а в Берлине — почти 60%.

“The number of fitness clubs in St. Petersburg exceeds demand. According to Delovoi Petersburg newspaper their services are, as before, enjoyed by a small segment of the Northern Capital’s populace. Currently, no more than 4.8% of Petersburgers work out in fitness clubs, as opposed to 20% of Londoners, 35% of Barcelonians, and nearly 60% of Berliners.”

ATTENTION! Why do you think this is the case? The first person to send me the correct answer in the comments, below, will get a special prize, dispatched via the mails from Berlin, where I am among the 40% of losers who do not work out in fitness clubs.

Please don’t use Google or other artificial intelligences to answer the question. Instead, use the brains the good Lord gave you.

Photo by the Russian Reader 

Who Cares, Right?

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Novaya Gazeta in Petersburg reported yesterday that Petersburgers who worked security at the football stadium in Nizhny Novgorod during the 2018 FIFA World Cup have not been paid their wages.

Since July 10, they have been living at the local train station. They have spent all their savings and now have no money to make the trip back home.

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Before they decamped to the train station, they were housed in the stadium itself in conditions as depicted in the photograph, above.

But you were glued to your TV sets the whole time, so what do you care? || TRR

Photos courtesy of the Express and KozaPress

Anything Goes

DSCN6137A monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, in central Petersburg, 6 May 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader

Ukrainian political prisoner Oleg Sentsov has been on hunger strike for sixty-six days.

Can you imagine not eating for sixty-sixty days? I can’t.

Instead of supporting Mr. Sentsov, most of the world decided to turn its back on him by staying glued to their TV sets during Vladimir Putin’s expensive celebration of his despotic regime’s extraordinary ability to pull the wool over nearly everyone’s eyes.

Certainly he didn’t get any pushback yesterday from the putative “leader of the free world,” who is a vain, spineless traitor who has probably never heard of Oleg Sentsov.

Solidarity with Oleg Sentsov doesn’t mean you have to stop eating, too, but it should mean not having your cake and eating it, too.

The World Cup was cake. Nobody can live for a month on a diet of cake without getting sick. The world has just done it, and now, at least as I see it, the world is a lot sicker than before the World Cup.

When infants are baptized in the Lutheran church, the priest asks the godparents and parents whether they “renouce the Devil and all his ways.”

Putin is a devil. You cannot embrace some of his ways while denouncing others. You either take the whole package or reject it. If you reject it, you show a little bit of willpower—for the sake of Crimean political prisoners Vladimir Balukh and Oleg Sentsov, for the sake of people bombed by the Russian airforce in Syria, for the sake of persecuted Karelian historian Yuri Dmitriev, for the sake of Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses, now branded “extremists” and subject to increasingly numerous arrests, for the sake of the innocent young people framed in the New Greatness and Network “terrorist” cases, for the sake of ordinary Russians everywhere fighting the government’s plans to drastically raise the pension age—and you don’t have anything to do with the World Cup or anything else sponsored, promoted, and supported by the current Russian regime.

The sheer number of people, including my own acquaintances, who could not bear to show solidarity with any of these people at all, if only for one month, has shocked me.

Please don’t pretend now that you’re really opposed to the Putin regime. You’ve shown your true colors.

Anything goes, right? || TRR

“A Truly Great Competition”: Yegor Yekimov Jailed in Petersburg for Picketing in Solidarity with Oleg Sentsov

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St. Petersburg Group for Assistance to Detainees
Facebook
July 15, 2018

On Saturday, Yegor Yekimov was detained in the Petersburg 2018 FIFA World Cup Fan Zone for holding a solo picket in solidarity with Oleg Sentsov and handing out leaflets.

The activist spent the night at the 71st Police Precinct.

Today, the Petrograd District Court sentenced him to five days in jail.

Mr. Yekimov has an illness that requires constant maintenance therapy. He must strictly avoid catching any infection whatsoever.

This fact, however, did not stop Judge Irina Grechishko, who sentenced Mr. Yekimov to jail.

Additionally, Mr. Yekimov is a voting member of an election commission, and the court had no right to try him without authorization from a prosecutor.

Mr. Yekimov has been taken to the detention facility on Zakharyevskaya Street in central Petersburg. Attorney Daniil Semyonov will file an appeal of the verdict tomorrow.

Translated by the Russian Reader

#SaveSentsov

Kicker Conspiracy

Go to Russia for a few World Cup fixtures, get rip-roaring drunk, hit on a married Russian woman, and you are an instant “Russia expert,” fit for print in the bloody Guardian.

And don’t forget to thank the Russian security forces for their professionalism in keeping your jet-setting, neo-colonialist, neo-imperialist ass safe while you’re making an ass of yourself.

Huge congratulations must go to the law enforcement that’s been put in place to stop both the most fighty Russians and the most fighty English from making their presence felt. But those responsible for the headlines with TOO MANY CAPITAL LETTERS should be ashamed. Not just for denying England fans these experiences, but for allowing the Russian people to feel demonised, and indeed for allowing Putin to capitalise on this othering of the Russian people to support his us-against-them narrative. Every English person that has a positive interaction with a Russian person is a step further away from letting the people in power turn us against each other … is what I drunkenly mumbled into Anastasia’s ear a few minutes before I learned she had a husband, and a few minutes after she’d said there are no good computer hackers in Russia, and about 20 minutes after I’d been singing “Football’s coming home”. We’re all living in our own fantasies I suppose.

_________________________________________

I wish everyone could read this detailed interview with the fearless Russian human rights activist Anatoly Kalyapin and head of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture about the nearly ubiquitous use of torture by Russian law enforcement.

Under ordinary circumstances, I might even think about translating the interview and publishing it on this website.

But these are not ordinary circumstances. As the Putin regime ratchets up its “Great Terror Lite” apparatus, a frighteningly large segment of apparently educated and even liberal Russians and non-Russians have persuaded me that having fun, partying like it’s 1999, and staying glued to their TV sets watching World Cup fixtures trump petty considerations like human rights and international solidarity.

So, if you’d like to read this interview with a knowledgeable, brave man, run it through whatever online translation machine you prefer and see what miserable gobbledygook comes out the other end.

It has finally dawned on me how few people, both inside and outside Russia, really care to know anything about the real Russia, especially since Don Putin started kicking magical, psychedelic, multi-colored sand in their face with his twelve-billion-dollar “kicker conspiracy.”

I have no hope for a planet whose most powerful, empowered, and well-off inhabitants have such a strong will to be fooled and such an insuperable desire to kick up their heels as if they were teenagers. // TRR

Thanks to Lika Frenkel for the heads-up and the late Mark E. Smith (March 5, 1957–January 24,  2018) for not refusing his vision and sharing it with us so generously for so many years.

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Kicker, Kicker Conspiracy
Kicker, Kicker Conspiracy

J. Hill’s satanic reign
Ass-lickers, Keegan’s Team

Kicker, Kicker Conspiracy

In the marble halls of the charm school
How flair is punished
Under Marble Millichip, the F.A. broods 
On how flair can be punished
Their guest is a Euro-State magnate
Corporate-u-lent

Kicker, Kicker Conspiracy 

In the booze club, George Best does rule
How flair is punished
His downfall was a blonde girl,
but that’s none of your business!

Kicker, Kicker Conspiracy

Football fan at the bus stop
Stretched on the balls of his feet
In the Christmas rush
Had in his hands two lager cans
Talks to himself
At the back
At the top

But in the pavement on the club unit
Plastic, Slime, Partitions, Cocktail, Zig-Zag, Tudor Bar

Pat McCat. Pat McCat, the very famous sports reporter is
talking there.

Fans remember, you are abroad!
Remember the police are rough!
Remember the unemployed!
Remember my expense account!

Hot dogs and seat for Mr. Hogg!
Hot dogs and seat for Mr. Hogg
And his grotty spawn!

Lurid brochures for ground unit
How style is punished

Kicker, Kicker Conspiracy
Remember, don’t collect with the rough
Kicker, Kicker Conspiracy

Kicker, destroy the facilities!

Kicker Conspiracy

Source: The Fall, “Kicker Conspiracy” (1983); lyrics courtesy of The Annotated Fall

The Bill for the 2018 World Cup

Russia and Brazil World Cup’s Leading Spenders over Last Twenty Years
Delovoi Peterburg
June 18, 2018


Photo by Sergei Konkov

Russia and Brazil took first place in terms of the cost of readying their countries to host the FIFA World Cup since 1998. A report by JLL, a consultancy company, shows each country spent $11.6 billion on organizing the event.

The report’s authors note that, according to the latest data available, Russia has spent ₽683 billion [approx. €9.3 billion] to host the World Cup. Thirty-nine percent of this money, or ₽265 billion, has been spent on building and repairing sports facilities.

The report’s authors also note that Russia has been the only recent host of the World Cup to build or renovate all twelve venues.

They write that Russia has set the per stadium record, spending an average of $380 million on each venue.

By way of comparison, South Korea and Japan spent $8.1 million on the 2002 World Cup; Germany, $7.7 billion on the 2006 World Cup; and South Africa, $5.2 billion on the 2010 World Cup. The most modest preparations were made by France for the 1998 World Cup. France spent only $2 billion on organizing the event.

infrastructure vs. venues

Russia spent the most money on infrastructure while preparing for the World Cup. The country invested $7.1 billion in infrastructure, including $3.9 billion on transportation infrastructure. Meanwhile, it spent $4.5 billion on stadiums.

Russia yields only to South Korea and Japan in expenditures on stadiums. They spent a total of $4.6 billion.

world cup 2018 costs

Overall, Russia spent ₽18.9 billion [approx. €256 million] more on getting ready for the World Cup than was planned in 2013.

According to the 2018 FIFA World Cup Organizing Committee’s preliminary estimate, as cited in JJL’s report, the summary economic impact of the 2018 World Cup on Russia during the period 2013–2018 will be ₽867 billion [approx. €11.8 billion] or roughly one percent of annual GDP. The primary effect will be achieved through investments and operating expenses. It is expected to reach ₽746 billion.

impact

 

The 2018 FIFA World Cup takes place in twelve stadiums in eleven Russian cities from June 14 to July 15, 2018.

Diagrams excerpted from “Investing into [sic] Football Passion: The Effect of the World Cup in Russia.” Article translated by the Russian Reader

Plato Re-Elaborated

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That city would not lack a yacht club, would not lack

a soccer club. Noting the absence of smoke from the brick

factory chimneys, I’d know it was Sunday,

and would lurch in a bus across town, clutching a couple of bucks.

 

I’d twine my voice into the common animal hoot-

ing on that field where what the head begins is finished by the foot.

Of the myriad laws laid down by Hammurabi

the most important deal with corner kicks, and penalty kicks to boot.

 

—Joseph Brodsky, “Plato Elaborated,” trans. George L. Kline, New Yorker, March 12, 1979, p. 40

 

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It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to be a regular guy, to immerse oneself in enjoying life, in a pleasant job, and forget that a dictatorship for life has taken root in our country? It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to forget the dictatorship wages war against neighboring countries? It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to forget it has destroyed all constitutional rights, the freedom of speech, secularism, the right to a pension, the right to one’s native language, and the right to forget things and be happy?

—Sergey Abashin, Facebook, June 24, 2018

Photo and translation by the Russian Reader

MP: Russian Women Should Avoid Sex with Foreign Men during World Cup

плетневаVeteran Russian MP Tamara Pletnyova (CPRF) has urged Russian women to avoid sex with foreign men during the 2018 World Cup, which kicks off tomorrow in Moscow. Photo courtesy of Life.ru

Russian Women Urged “Not to Engage in Sexual Relations” during 2018 World Cup
Fontanka.ru
June 13, 2018

Tamara Pletnyova, chair of the Russia State Duma’s Committee on Family, Women, and Children has urged Russian women not to engage in sexual relations with foreign men during the 2018 Football World Cup.

As the MP said this afternoon on radio station Moscow Speaking, inappropriate behavior on the part of Russian women would lead to the birth of children in single-parent families. Even if the foreign men married their sexual partners, it would not end well, the MP argued.

“Even if they marry the women and take them abroad, later on the women won’t know how to come back home. Women like that come to my committee for help. They cry, telling us how their husbands grabbed their children and left the country with them. I would like women in our country to marry men for love, no matter what their ethnicity, as long as they are Russian nationals who would build good families, live in harmony, have children, and raise them,” said Pletnyova.

The Duma committee chair argued many women became single mothers in the aftermath of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

“These kids have suffered since Soviet times. If the parents were from the same race, it was better than nothing, but if they were from different races, the kids had it bad. I’m not a nationalist, but nonetheless. I know the children suffer. Then they are abandoned, and that is that: they are left with their mothers,” Pletnyova said in conclusion.

Thanks to Sergey Abashin for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader