USSR | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

Jul 06 2019

Stephen Kotkin on Stalin.

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A third of the way through Stephen Kotkin’s middle chapter (Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941) of his mammoth three-volume study of Stalin, and it’s mind-blowing material. Fuck knows how long these books, with the final instalment still to be published, took to research and write. And it’s not just superlative academia; this chap with his razor-sharp wit can be funny as hell at times, which is most irregular when you consider the horrifying subject matter.

As an accessible compendium into what essentially made the Soviet Union work (Stalin’s own system of design) this is an unrivalled study of personal dictatorship and its geopolitical symbiosis.

As a speaker, Kotkin has been frequently described as ‘Professor Pesci’. Just listen to one of his lectures (posted below). Uncanny. I’d prefer, though, to not picture him in Casino (1995) with a hoodlum’s head in a vice.

Chernobyl – TV mini-series.

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Shot in Fabijoniškės, Lithuania, this 5-episode mini-series by HBO is a cracker so far (one episode in). It puzzles me how there’s not, to my knowledge, been a major TV series or film about Chernobyl until now. One wouldn’t expect this would come from the Russian slice of the former Soviet Union, but you’d think Ukraine (its ‘western-oriented’ regions) would have put something together.

Documentaries have been galore, the main theme that the disaster was indicative of the pitfalls of communism, and a metaphor for the swift end of the USSR in the Gorbachev era of glasnost and perestroika.

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This is mind-blowing, though, a real-life 28 Days Later (2002) with wild animals replacing the ‘infected’:

I know a good lad I met in Budapest, a fellow traveller named Paul. He’s the only person I’ve met who’s wandered into Pripyat’s Zone of Alienation with a Geiger counter. I have an epic image of him strolling about in a Walter White biohazard suit, with a beer hat atop the garb.

House of Soviets in Kaliningrad.

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What is it about the Evil Empire and their ugly-as-fuck brutalist buildings? A legacy imbued with obsessions of ‘social realism’ shows scant regard for anything ‘real’ about its constructs; concrete eyesores sticking out like sore thumbs, their centrepiece buildings merely highlight the lunacy of the ideology running the system.

In the Kaliningrad enclave, we have this anomaly plonked there, a robot geezer built beside the rubble of Königsberg Castle. It speaks to the USSR’s fixation with technology and its precedence over the human element. A central administration building, its interior was never finished and the project ran out of cash. It did, however, receive a paint job in 2005.

Nuts.

Siberian airspace during the USSR.

I thought an 11-hour, 6,000-mile flight from London to Tokyo was hell on earth, a suspended furnace of ghastly smells and even worse movies. On such claustrophobic ventures I do enjoy unearthing the laptop for a disaster-themed bonanza – Flight (2012) with the inimitable Denzel, Air Force One (1997), and an Air Crash Investigation bumper pack. If you’re going to reek worse than durian in a hobo’s socks, you’re going to be subjected to terrifying plane crash fun.

A wee peek into the Cold War glory days of grim and we find an 11-hour trip today the relative Shangri-La of a plane journey. For obvious reasons, the communist paradise of the Gulag restricted its airspace, with only Soviet planes allowed to fly above the Soviet Union. The solution was for Western airlines to traverse the Arctic, stop at Anchorage, and then proceed to Tokyo. This sub-zero town in Alaska was for a semi-epoch the transport hub for travel to Asia. With the fall of the Soviet Union it is now once again a backwater, the perfect milieu for the very bleak Christopher Nolan movie Insomnia (2002).

Today, Russia wields enormous power through its control over the Siberian flight corridor, and the country chooses which airlines have access (with great cost to the airline). Post World Cup this summer, one of the greatest fears of commercial airlines is that escalating tensions (some might say warfare, this proxy or cyber) between Russia and the West will usher in another airspace ban, with passengers once more forced to city-hop en route to their desired destination. The nineties and noughties – 9/11 aside – just might turn out to be the Golden Age of flying.

We don’t want shit like this happening again:

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Tagged Airspace, Alaska, Anchorage, Commercial jets, Flight corridor, Insomnia, Jet engine, Nolan, Plane travel, Planes, Russia, Siberia, Soviet Union, USSR

Wanderings and … wonderings.

Tag Archives: USSR

Stephen Kotkin on Stalin.

Chernobyl – TV mini-series.

House of Soviets in Kaliningrad.

Siberian airspace during the USSR.