Persons of No Interest

Despite its equestrian-themed title, misfit-spies motif and occasional reference to “Moscow rules,” Peacock’s new espionage thriller “Ponies” has little in common with Apple TV+‘s “Slow Horses.” Set in Cold War Moscow, “Ponies” falls, intriguingly and occasionally uneasily, somewhere between FX’s “The Americans” and underappreciated female-empowerment comedy film “The Spy Who Dumped Me.”

Which is not surprising since it was created by Susanna Fogel and David Iserson, co-writers of “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” which the former directed and the latter executive produced.

Opening with an attempt to extract a CIA asset from the clutches of the KGB, the series centers on Moscow’s American Embassy circa 1977 (with a soundtrack and brief glimpses of a young George H.W. Bush and, later, Elton John, to prove it).

As the American operatives engage in the obligatory shoot-‘em-up car chase, two women meet in a market. Though they are each less than thrilled with their almost nonexistent lives as wives of envoys to the associate of the U.S. ambassador (i.e. the spies from the opening sequence), their contrasting attitudes and sparky, odd-couple chemistry is immediately, and a bit ham-handedly, established.

Polite, rule-following and Russian-fluent Bea (Emilia Clarke) believes her husband, Chris (Louis Boyer), when he lovingly assures her that this posting will be over in a few years and soon she will be putting her unidentified Wellesley degree to better use. (Note to whoever wrote the Peacock press notes: A Wellesley degree does not make a woman “overeducated.”)

Tough-talking, streetwise Twila (Haley Lu Richardson) is not so deferential or deluded; she pushes Bea to face down an unscrupulous Russian egg merchant with profanity-laden elan. Unsurprisingly, her marriage to Tom (John Macmillan) is more than a little rocky.

Still, when their husbands die, ostensibly in a plane crash, Bea and Twila are grief-stricken — they have lost not only their husbands but their careers as foreign service wives.

Back in the U.S., Bea is bucked up by her Russian, Holocaust-surviving grandmother (the always welcome Harriet Walter), while Twila realizes she fled her hardscrabble Indiana background for good reason.

Determined to find out what really happened to their husbands, the two return to Moscow and confront station head Dane Walter (Adrian Lester), convincing him that their status as wives — the ultimate Persons of No Interest, or “PONI” in spy parlance — offers the perfect cover.

Ignoring the historical fact that both countries have long had female undercover operatives, Dane decides (and convinces then-outgoing CIA head Bush, played by Patrick Fabian) that Russia would never consider two women (including, you know, one fluent in Russian) a threat and, by the middle of the first episode, we’re off.

Reinstalled as secretaries, Bea’s mission is to get close to new asset Ray (Nicholas Podany), Twila’s to … be a secretary. She, of course, decides to become more involved, enlisting the aid of Ivanna (Lili Walters), an equally tough market merchant.

Everything gets immediately more complicated, and dangerous, when Bea catches the eye of Andrei (Artjom Gilz), a murderous KGB leader who may be able to lead the CIA to the surveillance facility that Chris and Tom were trying to find when they died.

Clarke, returning to TV for her biggest role since her career-making turn as Daenerys Targaryen in “Game of Thrones,” is the obvious headliner. And in early episodes she does, in fact, carry the series, evoking, with as much realism as the relatively light tone of the writing will allow, a woman whose self-knowledge and self-confidence have eroded after she was sidelined into the role of wife.

Richardson, who many will remember as Portia, long-suffering assistant to Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) in Season 2 of “The White Lotus,” is given the opposite task. Twila is, in Hollywood parlance, a “firecracker” — you know, the tough-talking dame who inevitably nurses a wounded heart. While drafting Bea as a spy makes a certain amount of sense, Twila’s skill set, as she is told, is being “fearless.” Her real talent, however, turns out to be standing up for “ordinary women,” including a string of prostitutes, murdered and forgotten.

Since neither woman receives the kind of training even most fictionally drafted civilian spies get in these kinds of stories, Bea and Twila are forced to rely on their wits, and the yin-yang balance of their good girl/tough girl relationship.

This makes for some great banter and fish-out-of-water moments, but it muddies the tone — are they being taken seriously as spies or not? — and requires significant suspension of belief (as does the Moscow setting created by Budapest; everyone keeps talking about how cold it is, but it never seems that cold). Fortunately, compared with their professional counterparts in most espionage dramas, the career agents on both sides appear, at least initially, to be quite limited in their spy craft as well.

An emerging plotline involving sex tapes and blackmail adds all sorts of tensions, as well as historical accuracy, and, as things get rolling, the spies become sharper and the notion of surveillance grows increasingly complicated and tantalizing.

Still, “Ponies” is obviously less interested in the granular ins and outs of gadgets, codes and dead drops than it is in the personal motivations of those involved and the moral morass that is the Cold War. “You came to Moscow to find truth?” an asset scoffs.

The cast is uniformly strong, the performances solid and engaging (Walter’s Russian grandma reappears midway through to show everyone how it’s done). If “Ponies” takes almost half of its eight-episode season to equal the sum of its parts, Fogel, who also co-wrote “Booksmart,” is a master spinner of female friendship, and Clarke and Richardson make it impossible not to instantly recognize, and connect with, Bea and Twila.

Their chemistry, and the absurdity of their situation, propels the story over any early “wait, what?” bumps and confusing tonal shifts into an increasingly propulsive and cohesive spy drama, with plenty of “trust no one” twists and turns, and the kind of period detail that would make “Mad Men” proud. (OK, yes, I am old enough to have tried the shampoo “Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific.”)

Fortunately, even as it moves with increasing assurance into “Tinker, Tailor” territory, “Ponies” remains a story of love. Which, as spies know only too well, can exist only when you accept, and share, the real truth about yourself. With a cliff-hanging ending, “Ponies” is betting that Bea and Twila will get another season to find their truths, even in Moscow.

Source: Mary McNamara, “‘Ponies’ elevates a Cold War spy story with emotional depth and female friendship,” Los Angeles Times, 15 January 2026

“The Shot Glass Beer Bar.” And what’s wrong with this picture? Another still from S1E1 of “Ponies”

The ryumochnaya is a purely Soviet phenomenon. It is a special snack bar in a Spartan format. It specialized in strong alcoholic drinks, with sandwiches served as appetizers or snacks. At some point, these “snack bars” turned out to be a form of “cultural recreation” available to most Soviet people.

“Men who usually drank port by their building entrances, like revolutionaries who gathered for a meeting in the basement or under a painted wooden mushroom figure on a children’s playground, could now go to a proper establishment, knock back a shot and intelligently [sic] have a bite of sandwich as a snack. Such a thing was not even dreamt of at that time,” journalist Leonid Repin wrote in ‘Stories about Moscow & Muscovites throughout time’.

The first USSR shot bars opened in Moscow in 1954. According to Moscow historian Alexander Vaskin, this was a political move by the new head of state, first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev. He had to quickly win the people’s love and authority.

“The idea to open shot bars in Moscow was not just good — it was fantastic! By creating a network of shot stores, the Party and the government showed great care for the health of the people and their cultural leisure,” Leonid Repin wrote.

They were designed to make lovers of liquor and vodka products more “cultured”, so that they did not drink in public places. But, some places became a refuge for citizens who could not find a place for themselves in the post-war USSR.

“At the corner of Mayakovskaya and Nekrasova streets [in Leningrad – ed.], there was a terrible drinking parlor full of legless invalids. It smelled of damp sheepskin, misery, shouting, fighting… it was a terrible post-war shot bar. There was a feeling that the people were deliberately made drunk there – all those ‘stumps’, ‘crutches’, former officers, soldiers, sergeants. They couldn’t find a way to keep these people warm and busy and this was one of the ways out,” writer Valery Popov speculated.

Cheap and cheerful

They poured vodka, port wine, liqueurs, wine and cognac in shot bars. Each shot was served with a modest snack – a sandwich with sausage, cheese, eggs, herring or sprat. There were four sprats on a sandwich, which was supposed to go with a 100 ml shot.

“There was only one inconvenience: after one drink, I wanted to drink some more and I had already had more than enough sandwiches. In general, it all happened like this: men stood there, knocking over shot after shot while making the ‘Leaning Tower of Pisa’ out of piles of sandwiches,” recalled Repin.

There were no tables or waiters in shot bars. Visitors lined up, received simple orders from the barmaid and then went to the bar tables.

Soviet writer and publicist Daniil Granin described a shot bar: “This is a glorious place – the smell of vodka, cigarettes, only men and without the forced drunkenness of bars, without molestation, sticky lingering conversations. Drank a shot, ate a sandwich, quickly and delicately.”

Simplicity implied low prices, so almost any citizen could afford to go to a shot bar. Prices and sandwich varieties were the same throughout the Soviet Union, recalls Alexander Vaskin.

“Prices were just kopecks. Everything happened in silence, with a sense of dignity. You drink up and then move on home or to see somebody or to the Philharmonic,” St. Petersburg historian Lev Lurie describes the advantages of a shot bar.

Overheard over a shot of vodka

In general, the visitors of such places were mostly decent.

“A factory worker and a journalist, an engineer and a plumber could all get together in a shot bar. It was not only a men’s club of interest, but also a place that attracted different people. It was possible to conduct sociological surveys and study the structure of society in them,” says Alexander Vaskin.

And the state did study it. As Lev Lurie notes, in the 1950s, almost half of political cases were initiated because of freethinking at shot bars.

“The ryumochnaya remained a haven for skilled, intelligent workers, who determined the social appearance of the city: serious, hardworking men who go fishing, watch soccer, take vacations in their factory’s preventorium or at the dacha. These establishments for visitors who had finished their work shift played the same role as pubs did in England,” he writes.

Shot bars today

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, initiated an anti-alcohol campaign. Its active phase lasted for two years, with the country reducing the production and sale of strong alcohol.

The measures also affected the shot bars.

The next blow to them was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The formation of the restaurant market in the country and the emergence of new formats of catering reduced the shot bars to the role of “nostalgic” establishments, frequented by an aging, but loyal audience.

“Rumochnayas were never rebuilt nor did they disappear anywhere. They remained, like the Rostral Columns, Zenith and ‘White Nights’, without changing their function. <…> The average age of visitors now is close to the retirement age: almost all of these people were brought up, knowing the simple and raw nature of a shot shop from childhood. All those who drank a lot, died, having failed to survive the 1990s. Only tough veterans now remain, who know their limit and are used to ‘cultured’ drinking,” Lev Lurie characterizes the situation in St. Petersburg.

A newfangled, post-Soviet ryumochnaya. Photo: Alexey Kudenko/Sputnik via Gateway to Russia

He emphasizes that it is in the Northern Capital that the shot bars have retained their popularity: according to Lurie, there are more of them than in Moscow, yet it is difficult for old places to attract a new audience.

“Shot shops don’t lend themselves to stylization. There have been several attempts to create something in this genre for a younger and better-off audience. They’ve all failed. Young people drink much less than their fathers and grandfathers and they are not hooked on vodka. Local hipsters prefer to have a ‘shot’ in a trendy bar somewhere on Dumskaya or Fontanka. But, real connoisseurs of the genre have not rushed to the new establishments – it is expensive. The shot bars are still alive, but they are slowly dying out along with their customers, like thick table magazines or a game of dominoes in the yard,” concludes Lurie, a St. Petersburg resident.

In Moscow, St. Petersburg or any other city in Russia, it is not a problem to find a shot bar: establishments in this format continue to open. Nevertheless, not all owners adhere to the principles of “old-school” shot bars; namely, simple, cheap and democratic. And any Soviet-styled “neryumochnaya” (non-shot bars) will still correspond to modern restaurant realities in terms of its interior and menu.

In the meantime, the genuine Soviet “ryumochnaya heritage” is hidden under inconspicuous signboards, in basements, visited by “their own” kind. It is cheap and cheerful, not fashionable at all, but authentic. The only difference is they have normal tables and chairs now.

Source: Yulia Khakimova, “The ‘ryumochnaya’: A bar of purely Soviet invention,” Gateway to Russia, 11 August 2023. Some of the claims and “factual” assertions, made above, should be taken with a grain of salt, although the overall picture painted is true to life. ||||| TRR

Tales of the NTS

The flag of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS)

Immediately after Stalin’s death, an American airplane dropped a group of young anti-communists into Maykop. Among them was Alexander Makov, a member of the NTS (National Alliance of Russian Solidarists).

They were soon arrested, and four of them, including Makov, were shot.

Thirty-five years later, in Paris, I made the acquaintance of Makov’s daughter, Natalya. Natalya Makova’s husband was Boris Miller, an NTS leader. Although they had been born in Europe and had never lived in the USSR, they thought only of the Russia which they had lost.

They threw me a luxurious lunch à la russe, featuring vodka, pickled herring, and borscht. After the second shot of vodka, Miller cut to the chase: “When will we be summoned to rule Russia?” He was confident that the Congress of People’s Deputies would hand over power to the NTS.

I decided that this was an endearing eccentricity on the part of people who knew absolutely nothing about the Soviet Union’s monstrosities and whose image of Russia was based on the novels of Lidia Charskaya. But they were quite serious and their efforts ended in a nightmare. Miller and Makova abandoned their comfortable life in Paris and moved to Yeltsin’s Russia, where all manners of horrors and humiliations awaited them. They were roundly windled, and Makova spent the rest of her savings on homeless girls, whom she decided to save in the Christian fashion. The girls paid her back with utter ingratitude, of course. Boris died in 1997, while Natalya died in poverty six years later. She had dreamed of obtaining an exoneration for her father, whom she considered a hero, but her application was categorically denied.

Yesterday, Makov’s interrogation records were declassified and partly published by the FSB—by way of showing that nothing has changed since 1953, either there or here, and nothing ever will change.

If I wanted to write a documentary novel about Russia, I would choose this story (but I don’t want to write such a novel).

Source: Dmitry Volchek (Facebook), 19 November 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Source: David C.S. Albanese, “In Search of a Lesser Evil: Anti-Soviet Nationalism and the Cold War,” Ph.D. dissertation, Northeastern University, 2015, pp. 118–119

The methods used by foreign intelligence services to undermine our country have not changed significantly over the years. In particular, enemy intelligence services have always been eager to employ traitors to the Motherland.

Materials declassified

The Central Archive of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has declassified materials from the case files on a reconnaissance team dropped by the Americans into the USSR in 1953.

Much was written about the American saboteurs after their arrest, and their names were at the time mentioned in almost all books about US intelligence operations against the USSR.

In the early 1990s, relatives of the team’s members attempted to obtain a decision from the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office regarding their exoneration, emphasizing that the group’s members did not work for American intelligence but rather “fought against Stalinism.” Nevertheless, even at the height of post-Soviet anti-communism, exoneration was denied.

So who did the Soviet secret services arrest in April 1953, less than two months after the death of the “leader of the peoples”?

“Alec,” “Pete,” “John,” and “Dick”

On the night of April 26, 1953, an aircraft of unknown origin violated Soviet airspace. The pilots managed to safely leave Soviet airspace after completing their mission—dropping a reconnaissance team.

The first two saboteurs were detained a few hours later—they introduced themselves as Vasilchenko and Matkovsky, code names “Alec” and “Pete.” They also revealed that “John” and “Dick” had parachuted with them.

The second pair of saboteurs did not get very far either: they were detained on the same day.

The group was equipped with weapons, ampoules of poison, four radio sets, radio beacons, and other equipment for sabotage and reconnaissance activities. The group also had gold with them, which was to serves as the financial basis for acquiring legal identities and carrying out their planned activities.

The Judas from Lysychansk

All four members of the group were former Soviet citizens who had collaborated with the Germans during the Great Patriotic War.

Vasilchenko, also known as “Alec,” was actually Alexander Lakhno, a native of Lysychansk. In 1941, he completed a course at an intelligence school in the Rostov Region and was sent to his hometown for underground work. But before he could really begin his activities, Lakhno was arrested by the Germans and told them everything he knew. In particular, he betrayed five Soviet intelligence officers whom he had known at the intelligence school.

The Germans liked Lakhno’s zeal and took him into their service. In 1943, as part of a Sonderkommando, he hunted down [Soviet] partisans in the Dnipropetrovsk Region, and then left with the Germans, who assigned him to the “Russian Security Corps”—an organization, established by White émigrés, which fought against the Yugoslav Partisans.

The radio operator from Kherson

Alexander Makov, a native of Kherson, voluntarily joined the German forces after his city was occupied. Initially, he mainly performed administrative tasks for them. During the Nazi retreat, attitudes toward collaborators changed, however and he was sent to one of the punitive units to fight Yugoslav Partisans in the Balkans. Makov applied himself zealously, for which he was transferred to the ROA [Russian Liberation Army]. There, the young man from Kherson was sent to reconnaissance school, and by the time the Nazis were defeated, Makov had completed courses as a reconnaissance radio operator.

The defectors

Before the war, Sergei Gorbunov had been sentenced to a year and a half in prison for theft, but as a minor, he was sent to a labor colony near Kharkov. Gorbunov was finally released at the war’s outset, but he did not want to fight for the Soviet Motherland—either because he was nursing a grudge against. it or because he thought that the Germans had already won. Be that as it may, he went to work for the occupiers and then retreated with them.

Dmitry Remiga, a native of the Stalin Region, expressed his desire to voluntarily go to work in Germany with his father after the occupation of his native land by Hitler’s forces.

All four ended up in the zone occupied by the Western Allies after the Nazis left. None of them wanted to return to the USSR, and they all sought ways to legalize their status in Europe.

From a trident-touting outfit to an American intelligence school

A career path was suggested by agitators from the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS). Incidentally, the NTS has a truly curious logo: the selfsame trident, so dear to Bandera’s followers, on top of the Russian tricolor.

The NTS explained that the West would soon declare war on the USSR, the Soviet regime would not survive, and those who proved themselves successful in the fight against the communists would live happily in the “Russia of the future.”

The four underwent training at an NTS propaganda school and then special training at the American intelligence school in Bad Wiessee.

As we have already mentioned, however, the preparation did no good—the team was quickly identified and captured.

The saboteurs explained that their mission included obtaining legal identities in Kiev and Odessa and further work with the American recon center. For more reliable legalization, any means were permitted: for example, they could murder a real Soviet citizen and take his papers.

A “reference” from the CIA: the attempt to exonerate the saboteurs

On May 22, 1953, th USSR Supreme Court’s Military Collegium found Lakhno, Makov, Gorbunov, and Remiga guilty of planning sabotage and terrorist acts and sentenced them to the supreme punishment—execution by firing squad.

The wording used to seek their exoneration was a curious sight. In 1993, Vera Lvova, a Petersburg reporter for the Express Chronicle, claimed, “Ultimately, the authorities will be forced to admit that people who gave their lives for Russia’s freedom and American spies-slash-saboteurs are not one and the same.”

In other words, if you graduated from an American intelligence school, parachuted from an American plane and were loaded with weapons and all kinds of intelligence equipment, and had a mission from the US intelligence services, you were simply fighting for Russia’s freedom.

But that’s not all. Exoneration campaigners cited the testimony of CIA veteran William Sloane Coffin, who said with a straight face, “Yes, I trained them, but we never asked them to spy.”

The apotheosis of this nonsense was a statement from the NTS that the saboteurs had been “dispatched to the USSR on behalf of the NTS to conduct patriotic propaganda against Stalin’s dictatorship.”

Credit must be given to the Prosecutor General’s Office, who endured this session of collective madness and refused to exonerate those whom the Americans had used to achieve their goals.

Source: Andrei Sidorchik, “They went to kill for the glory of US: FSB declassifies case of traitorous saboteurs,” Argumenty i Fakty (Federal Edition), 19 November 2025. Translated by Bad Robot with the Russian Reader. Thanks to Mitya Volchek for the heads-up.

More than forty years ago an item [in] the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta described me as “the minder of George Miller and a senior CIA manager.” The item caused considerable mirth among friends, while my wife pointed out that my salary as director of a modestly funded London-based think-tank seemed scarcely commensurate with my alleged role as a master spy. Moreover, far from minding George Miller (also known as George Miller-Kurakin), who worked for me at the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies as its research officer, I seldom knew where he was, or what he was doing.

Except for the fact that his suits came from Oxfam, George — bearded and with the social ease of a Russian aristocrat — could have stepped out of a novel by Tolstoy. He was born in Chile in 1955. His father Boris, an engineer, had migrated from Serbia where his own father, a White Russian émigré, had been murdered in front of the family. So began a pattern of events in which politics shaped the lives and hopes of three generations of the Miller family.

In Santiago, Boris Miller had met and married Kira Kurakin, a member of a distinguished family in Tsarist St Petersburg that had produced ambassadors and senior public servants over more than a century. In 1959, Boris and his young family moved to Frankfurt where he joined the counter-revolutionary National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), subsequently moving to London as the organisation’s UK representative. He was somewhat handicapped in his new role by his limited grasp of English. But his son, who knew no English on his arrival in London aged seven, went to a local grammar school, quickly becoming bilingual and speaking the language of his adopted country without a trace of accent by the time he had finished history degrees at Queen Mary College and Essex University. Whereupon he promptly followed in his father’s career as counter revolutionary.

George died from a heart attack in 2009, aged 54, having paid a heavy personal price for his vocation. But fond memories of him recently flooded back as the world marked the anniversary of the failed attempt by communist hardliners to take over the Soviet government in August 1991, an event which was followed in quick succession by the collapse of the Soviet government and the banning of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in November of that year — outcomes which George and his father had devoted their lives to help bring about.

In his twenties, George had relied for his income on his day job as my researcher, but he was an increasingly influential NTS member. Founded in the 1930s, the organisation operated underground in Russia but more or less openly in the rest of the world through a network of Russian exiles. Unlike many Western analysts, its members never doubted that the Soviet system would collapse, its spokesmen laying stress on the fact that communism went against the grain of human nature and was therefore doomed. Its declared aim was that of hastening the momentous day when Soviet communism would be replaced by a form of liberal democracy.

In describing their aims and tactics, George and his NTS colleagues were apt to compare the Soviet Union to an elephant being repeatedly bitten by a mosquito. At first the creature would be oblivious, but after a thousand stings, it would roll over without warning with its feet in the air, and die. The bites inflicted on the Soviet beast by NTS were numerous and unceasing.

Like the British Foreign Office, most British Sovietologists as well as politicians tended not take the NTS very seriously. Harold Wilson said that that the “u” in its title was silent. But the KGB took it sufficiently seriously to make assassination and kidnap attempts on its members and to arrest and imprison its members and contacts inside Russia. Soviet diplomacy was largely successful in pressing the Western governments not to do business with it, even persuading the West German government to close down the organisation’s Russian language radio station in Frankfurt. However, NTS members took evident comfort from General Secretary Andropov’s description of NTS as “public enemy number one.”

Recently, prominent members of the Conservative party and others in senior positions in business and British public life, now middle aged, have described how as young party activists they were recruited by George to take part in a clandestine NTS operation to carry banned literature into the Soviet Union. In this role Miller was assisted by radicals — mainly passionate Thatcherites — within the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) who relished the high excitement and sense of purpose which their clandestine activities afforded.

Among those recruited by George were the current schools minister, Nick Gibb, his brother Sir Robbie Gibb (Theresa May’s communications director during her premiership), and Peter Young (founder of the aid contractor, Adam Smith International). Another prominent FCS member, Russell Walters, now an executive with Philip Morris, echoed the sentiments of his fellow subversives when he commented, “it was the noblest act I have ever performed. I remain very proud of what we did.”

Posing as tourists, the couriers took in medical supplies, money and office equipment as well as books, all strapped to their bodies under baggy clothes. They brought out uncensored accounts of the harsh realities of Soviet life, the imprisonment of dissidents and the evidence of economic failure as well as literary works which for political reasons their authors could not publish in Russia.

In all, George recruited around 60 couriers, a handful of whom were arrested and briefly held by the Russian authorities. On those occasions their arrest was effectively used by him to attract headlines in the international media in order [to] drive home the totalitarian nature of the Soviet system and the violation of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 which pledged the signatories to respect fundamental freedoms.

The couriers’ task took nerve as well as idealism but the risk they took was less great than that taken by their contacts. Simon Clark, another of George’s couriers, said recently, “we could leave the Soviet Union on the next plane. Our contacts couldn’t. The risks they took every day were enormous and potentially life changing. My principle contact was arrested a year or two after my visit. He received a three year prison sentence. I don’t know what happened to him after that.”

The materials brought out were used by NTS to brief Western newspapers, the Russian service of the BBC, Radio Liberty and any parliamentarian who was prepared to listen. Sharing seemingly little of his FCS friends’ ideological zeal — he had joined the young Liberals rather than the Conservative Party for what I suspect were tactical reasons — George, personable, humorous and pragmatic, provided an increasingly trusted source of information. This was stored in the NTS’s British office, the semi-detached home of George’s parents in Baring Road, Lee, an unfashionable part of south east London.

George used his growing influence in London to arrange for a weekly summary of extracts from Russian opposition publications to be published in The Times. He also persuaded large numbers of friends and contacts to send pamphlets through the post to individual Russians identified from Soviet phone books.

Shortly after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, George travelled there to gather first hand evidence of the use of poison gas against the Afghan fighters. Forging links with National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, he subsequently drew up detailed analysis of the role of the different elements of the gas attacks. With others, he is believed to have persuaded the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, to provide anti-aircraft weapons to the Afghan resistance.

Some three years after his first visit to Afghanistan, George asked my permission to leave immediately for a few days’ holiday, a request which seemed quite out of character. Eight weeks later, he returned smiling with a Boots folder containing what he described as his holiday photos. These turned out to be pictures of him in company of members of the mujahidin over whom he towered as he waved a Kalashnikov.

I later discovered that George — who had been accompanied by other NTS members including the novelist and historian, Vladimir Rybakov — arranged for two captured Russian soldiers to be allowed to be released and given safe passage to the West, an act which may well have saved their lives. George also provided me with a compelling account of how US military aid was falling into the hands of anti-Western factions. This, as he pointed out, necessarily had the effect of strengthening them in in relation to relatively pro-Western rival groups.

I arranged for him to meet a well-connected American friend who was as impressed and alarmed as I had been by George’s detailed and authoritative account. As subsequent events have demonstrated, it was advice that should have been heeded, but my contact later reported, “it’s no go. The US State Department regards the enemies of America’s enemy as its friend. It lacks the imagination to grasp that this particular enemy of our enemy might also be America’s enemy.”

George’s range of anti-Soviet activities was more extensive than most of his friends realised at the time and demonstrated imagination as well as George’s ability to inspire trust from those with whom he worked. Julian Lewis, the chairman of the Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee with whom Miller worked to counter the activities of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), described him “as compassionate and courageous. He was mystical, spiritual, selfless and humane, a hero of our times.”

When a tiny Moscow-based “Group for Establishing Trust” was cited by members of CND as evidence that a peace movement could be built inside the Soviet bloc, George sent FCS members to Moscow to distribute anti-nuclear leaflets on the Moscow underground. One was arrested and kicked out causing just the kind of publicity that was needed to demonstrate the stupidity of the CND position. He subsequently arranged for one of the group’s advisers, Oleg Popov, to visit London where he was enthusiastically welcomed by CND as well as by George. But the latter evidently made a bigger impression on Popov than the CND leaders. At a press conference, Popov thanked the disarmers for their support but declared, “unilateral disarmament is no answer. It is nonsense and potentially dangerous.”

Other activities included the creation of the Association for Free Russia and the editorship of Soviet Labour Review, a detailed and authoritative bimonthly journal of labour relations in the USSR.

In 1986, Miller successfully sabotaged what was intended as a major Soviet propaganda coup to weaken support for Western nuclear deterrence. The occasion was the Copenhagen “Peace Congress” staged by the Soviet controlled World Peace Congress. His wrecking strategy had been worked out in cooperation with the Coalition for Peace Through Security, an anti-CND outfit run by two future Tory MPs, Julian Lewis and Edward Leigh. As the event opened, George and two others could be seen on the platform unfurling a giant banner on the platform which read “This is the KGB’s Peace Congress.” Photos of the trio being manhandled off the stage dominated the following morning’s Danish press. And when on the final day of the event dozens of activists who had been mysteriously provided with delegate credentials mounted a vociferous campaign against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan the resulting mayhem received worldwide media coverage.

George was in London at the time of the Communist hardliners’ botched August coup of 1991. But his father — sensing that dramatic change might be imminent — had flown to Moscow and made contact with those loyal to Boris Yeltsin, standing besides Yelstin as he faced down the Russian tanks outside the Russian parliament. Yeltsin subsequently passed a special decree making him a Russian citizen.

George arrived in Russia for the first time shortly afterwards, kissing Russian soil on his arrival, keenly anticipating a process of democratic reform and the privatisation of the Russian economy in which he hoped to play a significant role. His wife, Lilia, and two children were to follow him from England.

But subsequent events did not evolve as he would have wished. In January 1991, a meeting of the NTS council, of which George and his father, Boris, were members, was split on whether or not its representatives should join the new Yeltsin government. George argued powerfully that the historic opportunity should not be missed to help shape Russia’s democratic future. An opposing faction, which included his father, argued that the offer was a trap set by its old KGB enemies and that it would be better to wait for a more propitious moment to enter government; perhaps both proposals contained an element of wish-fulfilment. Boris’s faction won by a single vote, resulting in a lasting rift between father and son, and George’s immediate resignation from the NTS.

Boris died penniless in a Moscow hospital following a heart attack in 1997. He had spent his last years as the Russian head of an international human rights body, appearing regularly on Russian television to denounce various human rights violations.

Although he had little practical knowledge of privatisation and of business, George went on to work to in the Economics Ministry under Anatoly Chubais, the privatisation minister. But he grew rapidly disillusioned by the emergence of crony capitalism. Several of the reforms he sought did not materialise and he grew increasingly aware that a new class of oligarchs, many with KGB backgrounds were exclusively concerned with personal enrichment.

George complained to friends that Russia now resembled America’s Wild West. But as the historian, Norman Stone, pointed out, the difference was that in America’s Wild West there was a judge, a sheriff and a preacher. I had often teased George by suggesting that he might not like living in the Russia that would emerge if he and his friends succeeded in destroying the Soviet system: the sad truth is that he did not.

Keenly aware that he had neglected his family’s material interests and his own health by the single-minded pursuit of political aims, he now sought consultancy work advising Western companies on business opportunities. But by this time his wife had returned to Britain and what funds he had saved went on a divorce.

I last saw George about 18 months before his death after he rang to suggest a meeting. George remained cheerful and showed no sign of bitterness. He declared his intention to remain in England where his children were being educated and asked me whether I would run a new think-tank for which he would find funds. Its purpose, he explained would [be] to analyse threats to liberal democracy, including those posed by the country which he had struggled to free from communism, as well that posed by China. The money would come from backers of various environmental projects in which he had become enthusiastically involved, including one with plans develop the means to turn pig dung into energy. Companies were set up in his name, but little progress was made and there was no income stream. As we parted, I pondered on whether the project had come to fill the place of an earlier vision that had died.

Like me, the couriers recruited by George Miller remember him with fondness and respect. The Soviet elephant did indeed roll over and die. The proximate reason for the Soviet collapse may have been Western policies vigorously promoted by Reagan and Thatcher which in turn prompted the Soviet leadership to attempt to modernise, unleashing forces which it was powerless to control. But George, along with a relatively small number of anti-communist activists and scholars shaped the environment which made those Western policies possible. Although he had been given ample reason to reflect on the need to think carefully about what he wished for, I don’t think he regretted any of his counter-revolutionary activities.

Nor do those who helped him.

Source: Gerald Frost, “George Miller: Anti-Communist,” The Critic, 22 August 2021

The grave of NTS founding chairman Duke Serge von Leuchtenberg de Beauharnais (aka Sergei Nikolaevich Leuchtenbergsky)
at El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey, California. Photo courtesy of Comrade Koganzon

Duke Sergei Nikolaevich Leuchtenbergsky (1896, St. Petersburg–June 27, 1966, California) was a Russian politician, translator, founder and first leader of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), and great-great-grandson of Russian Emperor Nicholas I.

He was born in 1896. In the Civil War, he served under his father, Major General N.N. Leuchtenbergsky, during the formation of the Southern Army and the Don Army. In exile, he graduated from the noncommissioned officer school of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS). From 1930 to 1933, he headed the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS).

During World War II, he served as a translator in the German 9th Army, then headed the propaganda department and was a translator for the Rzhev Commandant’s Office and the headquarters of the German VI Corps.

In 1925, he married Anna Alexandrovna Naumova (born 1900), and they had four children. A year after his divorce (1938), he married Kira Nikolaevna Volkova (born 1915), but their marriage was annulled in 1942. In 1945, he married Olga Sergeevna Wickberg (born 1926), who bore him two children.

He died on June 27, 1966, and is buried at El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey, California.

Source: Wikipedia (Russian). Translated by Bad Robot with the Russian Reader

Red Africa

In the 1960s, a wave of newly independent African states found themselves courted by a far-flung friend: the Soviet Union. Alexander Markov’s engrossing archival documentary, assembled from footage shot by Soviet crews between 1960 and 1990, charts the breadth of Moscow’s project to export socialism to the African continent. Red Africa threads dignitary visits, infrastructure projects, and Cold War–era cultural exchange into the excavation of a single soft-power machine, while also demonstrating the power of the cinematic image to propel myth-making at home up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Closer afield, We Love Life, which opens the screening program, revisits propaganda and home movie footage of the Spartakiads, a mass sporting event held in communist Czechoslovakia from World War II to the Velvet Revolution. Through the film’s kaleidoscopic editing, its scores of synchronized bodies vibrate as a site where ideology, collective memory, and personal experience converge.

We Love Life. 2022. Great Britain. Directed by Hana Vojáčková. North American premiere. In Czech, Slovak, English; English subtitles. 29 min.

Krasnaya Afrika (Red Africa). 2022. Russia/Portugal. Written and directed by Alexander Markov. North American premiere. In Russian, Portuguese; English subtitles. 65 min.

Thu, Feb 23, 4:30 p.m. • Introduced by Hana Vojáčková • MoMA, Floor T2/T1, Theater 2

Sun, Mar 5, 4:00 p.m. • MoMA, Floor T2/T1, Theater 1

Source: MoMA

Trailer for Red Africa (2022), directed by Alexander Markov. Courtesy of Courtesy of Visions du Réel

Landwehr Canal, Berlin

DSCN2952

Landwehr Canal, Berlin
The canal where they drowned Rosa
L. like a stubbed out papirosa
Has almost virtually gone wild.
So many roses have moldered since that time,
It is no mean feat to stun the tourists.
The wall, concrete forerunner of Christo,
Runs from city to calf and cow
Through fields blood has scoured.
A factory smokes like a cigar.
And the outlander pulls up the native gal’s
Frock not like a conqueror
But like a finicky sculptor,
Getting ready to unveil
A statue fated to live a while
Longer than a reflection in the canal
Where Rosa was canned.

Source: Radio Svoboda. Photo and translation by the Russian Reader

Yevgeniy Fiks: Mister Deviant/Comrade Degenerate

mister deviant

Mister Deviant, Comrade Degenerate: Selected Works by Yevgeniy Fiks
June 15, 2019–July 31, 2019
Voorhees Gallery (Entrance)

Within the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, political, sexual, and artistic nonconformists were conflated and viewed as dangerous internal enemies that terrified the insecure and paranoid governments and societies. The political deviant, the sexual outlaw, and the uncensored artist became the shared “others” for the Cold War-era Soviets and Americans, a problematic political legacy that still resonates today.

This exhibition offers a lesson in history for twenty-first-century societies and confronts the instrumentalization of homophobia, anti-liberalism, and anti-modernism as tools of propaganda and ideology in both the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War—providing a learning tool through which we can critically examine contemporary developments in world politics and societies. It explores the Cold War era’s persecution of various nonconformist groups on both sides of the ideological divide, including political dissidents, queers, and avant-garde artists, who remain targets of contemporary witch hunts all over the world.

Ranging from dry factuality to humor and farce, the exhibition begins with a series of prints and photographs titled “Homosexuality is Stalin’s Atom Bomb to Destroy America,” highlighting the interlocking histories of the “Red” and “Lavender” scares during the McCarthy era in the United States, when anti-Soviet and anti-gay sentiments were fused together in the Cold War witch hunt rhetoric. Pundits and government officials went as far as envisioning a sinister conspiracy: the Soviet Union is promoting homosexuality as a tool to destroy America. At the same time, the federal government purged homosexuals that it employed, calling them “security risks”—vulnerable of being blackmailed by Soviet agents into working for them. Ironically, in the Soviet Union, the ideological enemy of the United States, homosexuality was officially criminalized after 1934—with a prison sentence of up to five years—and stigmatized and tabooed as an anti-Soviet “capitalist degeneracy” that comes from the foreign and “decadent West.”

Born in Moscow in 1972, Fiks moved to New York in 1994. Since then, his multifaceted practice has bridged both worlds, exploring themes of memory, repression, and the legacy of the political Left in Russian society and the United States. Fiks’s engagement across time periods resonates strongly with the Zimmerli’s commitment to contemporary issues in art and its rich collection of Russian art from the Soviet period, as found in the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union.

Organized by Thomas Sokolowski, Director of the Zimmerli Art Museum

Fulda Gap

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 hangs 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.

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 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.

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!

Overtaking America

Despicable but predictable. My heartfelt thanks to Mr. Shuvalov for finally having the guts to admit what has been obvious for years: that the Russian elites and mostly nonexistent Russian middle class are sick off their asses on catching up with and overtaking the specter of “America.” So, which side never stopped fighting the Cold War? The greedy mid-level KGB officers who have been running Russia for the last eighteen years. If you didn’t know that already, it means you’ve been looking in the wrong direction all this time. And to think this is what the “struggle against imperialism” has come to. Oh, and the VTsIOM “polling data” about “happiness,” cited at the end of this article, is total bullshit, yet another smelly burp from the well-funded belly of Russia’s rampant pollocracy. TRR

Screenshot of the alleged slogan of the 19th World Festival of Youth and Students, currently underway in Sochi. Courtesy of the festival

Shuvalov: Russia’s Goal Is For Russians to Be Happier than Americans
Fontanka.ru
October 18, 2017

By 2024, industrious Russians with higher educations will be able to catch up with and overtake abstract [sic] Americans in terms of happiness. Such were the horizons painted by First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov at the 19th World Festival of Youth and Students on October 18 in Sochi.

“Goal number one is that, when the next political cycle [sic] is completed, in 2024, anyone who has a basic [sic] higher education and the ability to work would feel happier than in the United States,” said Shuvalov, according to Lenta.ru, as cited by RIA Novosti.

A presidential election is scheduled for 2024.

According to the Monitoring Center at RANEPA’s Institute of Social Sciences, nearly 45% of working Russians do not understand the purpose and meaning of the government’s economic policies. Only 47% of Russians have a sense of the government’s actions vis-à–vis the economy.

In August, the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) published the results of a poll, according to which approximately 84% of Russians consider themselves happy.

Earlier, in April, according to VTsIOM, the percentage of Russians who felt happy reached its highest level since 1990, amounting to 85%.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up

Screenshot of the homepage of the 19th World Festival of Youth and Students, currently underway in Sochi, Russia.

Alexander Markov: A Soundtrack to Soviet Africa

Alexander Markov
Soviet Filmmakers in Africa from the 1960s to the 1980s

In 1960, seventeen African countries gained their independence. For the two superpowers, competing for influence in the Cold War, these “new” countries were obvious opportunities for deploying their own power. Under Khrushchev’s Thaw, Soviet foreign policy increasingly focused on Africa and the Arab world, which became priorities for proactive Soviet diplomacy.

The 1960s thus witnessed the heyday of African studies in the Soviet Union. A number of Soviet filmmakers were dispatched to the continent to produce newsreels and documentary films whose mission was to record the “friendships” between the Soviet socialist specialists at the helm of scientific progress and the African socialist hopefuls who had just broken free from the yoke of colonialism.

The films were given titles such as Hello, Africa!, We Are with You, Africa!, and Good Luck to You, Africa!, to convey that desire for friendship unambiguously, and to contrast starkly with films produced on the other side of the Iron Curtain, such as the notorious Italian documentary about the “dark continent,” Farewell Africa (Addio Africa, 1966), which speculated that civil wars and bloody conflict would set the continent ablaze after the European colonialists exited it.

Despite the fact that Soviet film production was centralized in Moscow and Leningrad, studios in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, and Uzbekistan also produced documentaries about Africa. The best filmmakers were involved in their production, and Saving Bruce Lee focuses on four of them: Yuri Aldokhin, Mikhail Litvyakov, Vladlen Troshkin, and Rimtautas Šilinis, who made films about Mali, Congo, and Tanzania between 1960 and 1980.

There was also an interest among Soviet filmmakers in documenting wars of independence and armed conflicts (Ethiopia, Libya, Algeria, Congo, Egypt, Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia), but such films were produced differently. Only cameramen were dispatched to film on location, and most of them were veteran WWII cinematographers.

Nearly half of the Soviet documentary and newsreel films about Africa recorded official visits by Party leaders, government officials, and heads of states. The other half presented partly imaginary Soviet constructions of African reality.

On the one hand, the filmmakers were under the spell of a revolutionary romanticism. In factories, schools, and universities, in streets and in squares, Soviet citizens had marched and rallied in support of the aspirations of their African comrades for liberation from colonial rule and the right to self-determination. On the other hand, Khrushchev’s Thaw itself contained a promise for better times for Soviet citizens themselves that echoed the hopefulness of the newly sovereign African countries. The imaginary construction of socialist Africa was fashioned according to Soviet paradigms, with soldiers and youth on the march, collective farms, and one-party rule.

The documentaries produced during the Thaw are peculiar, because while they toe the ideological line, they are nonetheless imbued with the loosening of inhibitions that permeated Soviet society at the time. So while an ideologically motivated eye will only see what it wants to see, in these films, the cinematographer’s lens betrays a tangibly genuine curiosity about the “otherness” of African reality that would be impossible to counterfeit.

In contrast with the footage of official parades and collective farms, the films also capture ordinary people going about their everyday lives. The camera conveys the contradictory emotions and mindset of the people standing behind them, in which simple, unfiltered affection and enthusiasm blend with the cinematic idioms of the era.

Ordinary Africans were shown at the helm of a historical transformation, thus embodying the journey toward the “radiant future.” This was another echo with the spirit of the Thaw that, paradoxically, made Soviets more congenial to Africans. It was a seemingly naïve illusion in retrospect, but it was emblematic of the period.

The dramatic structure of these Soviet documentaries about Africa produced in the 1960s and 1970s is perhaps where the ideological conditioning is most palpable. Almost all fit into a particular generic scheme or pattern, because they were commissioned by a state that valued ideology more than the art of documentary cinema.

The footage was edited to fit a script, drafted in the studio back in Moscow or Leningrad, and narrated in a voiceover. Soviet composers were also commissioned to provide the musical scores. In other words, the soundtracks rarely featured sound from the locations where they were filmed, and the voices of everyday Africans were almost entirely absent. Instead, the Soviet narrative carefully guided the viewer’s experience of the moving images.

In this exhibition, the soundtracks have been severed from the images, and the cinematic footage has been freed from its bondage to the master narrative. I would thus like to propose a critical rethinking of the era and the language of Soviet political film.

__________

These are Petersburg filmmaker Alexander Markov’s notes to his contribution to Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy (A Prologue), an exhibition curated by Koyo Kouoh and Rasha Salti, in collaboration with Alexander Markov and Phillippe Rekacewicz. The exhibition is on view at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow from June 12 to August 23, 2015.

Alexander Markov’s documentary film Our Africa will be released in 2015 or 2016.

Beautiful Village, Ugly Fate

Beautiful Village – Ugly Fate
The houses in the villages of Akonlahti are bigger and grander than those in Viena generally. The village was a wealthy one. Conditions were favorable for farming, fishing and hunting, and the proximity of the border made trade fruitful as well.

Before the border was closed, the villagers of Akonlahti dealt with the people in the Finnish village of Rimpi on an everyday basis. Even after the border was officially closed in the 1920s, contact between the villages continued for some time. During the Continuation War (1941-44), the villages of Akonlahti were occupied by the Finns, and not all of the people succeeded in leaving the village before it was occupied. Life continued – as normally as possible under the circumstances – but when the war ended, many of the villagers moved to Finland, fearing that they would be accused of collaboration with the Finnish enemy if they stayed in Russia.

After the War, life in the villages continued around the collective farm that had been established in the area. The post-War population comprised former permanent residents of the village, returning evacuees, and people from villages whose houses had been destroyed in the conflict. Efforts were made to concentrate habitation in the village of Akonlahti proper.

When the Soviet Union began the process of destroying small villages in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Akonlahti came to be considered a village “without perspective”. Vis-à-vis the district center it was on the periphery; it was difficult to maintain the roads leading to the village and to arrange the transport of food and other goods there. The main reason, however, for the village falling into disfavor was its proximity to Finland: it was a stone’s throw from the border at the height of the Cold War.

The destruction of the village was extraordinarily violent, although various explanations have since been advanced to tone down the harshness of the event. In 1958, the authorities responsible for liquidating the village sent in airplanes, which landed on the ice of Lake Kiitehenjärvi. The villagers were given a few hours to gather their belongings. And then it was time to leave. Children, the elderly and calves were taken by plane to Uhtua; everyone else had to walk there with the livestock. Yet virtually every family had to slaughter their animals, because there was no hay or other fodder for them where they were going. To seal the village’s fate, all of the houses were then burnt to the ground, so that no one would have the remotest chance of returning.

Fortunately, Väinö Kaukonen and Vilho Uomala had photographed Akonlahti and its surroundings during the War. Future generations will at least have these images to help them appreciate the village that played the most significant role in the Karelian building tradition.

When Finland and the Soviet Union established a “Park of Friendship” in 1991, the Akonlahti area became part of a nature preservation area. When the Park was first founded, only researchers were allowed to go to the shores of Lake Kiitehenjärvi. Later, however, Park administrators and the Folklore Villages Project, set up to preserve and revitalize the culture of the song-lands of the Kalevala, reached an understanding whereby buildings can once again be built in the Karelian style in Akonlahti and the village will be opened up to travellers interested in culture and nature.

source: The Viena Karelian Folk Villages

“Howard Zinn, a Leftist Intellectual of Jewish Descent”

In the mid-1990s, I used to remark, only partly in jest, that Russia was the greatest country in the world because there were more Nirvana albums for sale here than in any other country. The country’s kiosks and shops were then flooded with a dizzying number of bootlegs of recordings by many of my favorite bands. It often seemed then that the Russian bootleggers were having a ball reinventing and re-imagining their discographies.

In a similar but much less innocent vein, in more recent years some Russian publishers have repackaged and retitled translated works of nonfiction by non-Russian authors in response to perceived ideological demand.

You might not guess it from the cover and the description, below, but this is a new (authorized?) Russian edition of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States:

American Empire: From 1492 to the Present Day
Howard Zinn

ISBN: 978-5-4438-0662-4
Year of Publication: 2014
Publisher: Algorithm
Series: Mankind’s Greatest Empires

Description
Howard Zinn, a leftist intellectual of Jewish descent, was along with Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag one of the most consistent critics of American foreign policy. The well-known American political scientist, author, and doctor of historical sciences, taught at Boston University, Paris, and Bologna. His book, reprinted several times in America and across the Atlantic, contains a view of the most important events in American history from colonial times to the beginning of the twenty-first century that largely differs from traditional American historical science.

It is packed with unusually vivid and interesting facts, enabling the Russian reader to better understand our potential enemy in the past [sic] and, quite possibly, in the near future.

This work will certainly attract the attention of not only professional historians, sociologists and political scientists but also anyone interested in the history of the United States.

For those over 16 years of age.

Further information about the publication:
Hardcover, 752 pages
Circulation: 1,200 copies
Format: 60 x 90 cm/16 (145 x 215 mm)

source

A big thanks to Comrade VT for the heads-up.

UPDATE. It might not be clear to readers outside of Russia or unfamiliar with Algorithm publishing house that this repackaging is something akin to Mormon baptisms for the dead, who against their already unknowable will are converted to Latter-Day Saints. In this case, Howard Zinn has been made after death to serve the Russian neo-imperialist/neo-Stalinist cause. That this is the prevailing tendency at Algorithm is apparent from their September 2014 catalogue, which features such titles as Russia’s Eurasian Revenge, by the now-ubiquitous fascist warmonger Alexander Dugin; The West versus Russia, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (who never published a book with this title in his lifetime), described as “a unique collection of incisive polemical texts about the standoff between western civilization and Russian civilization by Dostoevsky, one of the most widely read Russian classic authors”: Stalin’s Wolfhound: The True Story of Pavel Sudoplatov; and A Future without America, by Lyndon Larouche (this is another book whose title, at least, seems to exist only in the Algorithm universe).