#Post Soviet Future

[panvolkkaraczewski]

Then | Time isn’t linear in tomorrow

Time isn't linear, and neither is culture. Your grandmother's photo album, but it’s phonk 📀

[ineffablecrisp]

Soviet!Ice Headcanons

I've decided to do a little follow up, hope you enjoy!

Born as Toma Efimovich Kazansky in Odessa, Ukraine

His favorite food is his babushka's borscht and likes to drink more kvass than he should on a daily basis

He and his family left the Soviet Union in 1973, when he was 14 years old

Settled in New York, since it has a large Jewish population

Because of the Soviet Union's disapproval of religions (especially Judaism) he wasn't able to have a proper Bar Mitzvah, so his family quickly joined a shul so he could have one

Being Jewish in America was a strange experience for him- everyone knew how to read the funny looking words in the siddur but he couldn't, since he never learned Hebrew before coming to America. Even amongst Jews he still felt like he didn't fit in because of his background

And also being a Soviet immigrant made him stick out like a sore thumb among his classmates, who were suspicious of the new kid with the funny accent and last name. Over time, he learned how to speak English without an accent so he wouldn't be bullied

Many people have called him slurs. Over time, he figured it's best not to show any emotion. This is one of the reasons why his callsign became Iceman

The other one being that because he speaks Russian, people assume him to be incredibly stoic and completely void of any emotions

Few people know he speaks Russian. Only Slider does, and later, Maverick. Most people who meet him immediately notice the Jewish last name but don't realize right away that he speaks a different language

Preferred to hide his Jewish practices from pretty much everybody. He still observed, but only in private. The only two people he truly felt comfortable enough to open up about this were Slider and Maverick

(not so much Soviet but more Jewish, he and Mav get married under a chuppah much later in the future)

[donutboxers]

🕹️ inspired by A Relic of the Past 🕹️

introduction to USSR "PERI" EAM-83 by MIDPOINT based on Морской бой (Sea Battle) by MIDWAY

For 0.15 SUR the people of 1973 Soviet Russia had the chance to fight off enemy ships through a real periscope viewfinder, equipped with sight windows, a map of military hostilities, a score board, and ship and ammunition names. people everywhere had an entertaining and semi-realistic way to experience the every day perils of the Soviet Navy

Now for 2,700 SUR, ten years into the future you too can experience this with ease, on MIDPOINT'S improved recreation, PERI, equipped with two new ship steering wheels and control panels for multiplayer mode and a novelty periscope, this is the perfect edition to any vintage arcade game lover's collection

A few interesting websites/videos i found during this:

➮The Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines

➮Morskoi Boy

➮Arcade games from the Soviet Union

And a few cool pictures of the arcade machine this is based on:

[sneakystorms]

TSAR ALEXANDER THE FIRST?

[sudensk-the-stallionist]

Although i certainly find universal nuclear disarmament to be a morally correct and honourable goal, it's also very clear that a reasonable part of those campaigning for it are very entrenched in anti-communist views - focusing with much strictness on the development of nuclear warheads by the DPRK, China and Russia (which isn't socialist, but nevertheless). At best they criticize the gigantic war industry of the US, but only by liberal metrics of "we should only have the necessary" and stuff like that. However, it is also clear that the development of nuclear armament - although not the main priority - should, very clearly, be something that socialist states now and in the future must consider. Even if not full blown nuclear armament - at least ICBMs and others like it. For it is not a mistake or an insanity that the DPRK, for example, has developed nuclear warheads; it knows that it is the subject of constant international harassment and it is prepared to have what is, for now, the most powerful rhetorical weapon against this. Future socialist countries should, yes, follow this! And, you see, a big number of communists mainly in the West (and to great extents elsewhere) do not see military strategy and development post-revolution as important. And this is stupid! Foolish! Russia was the subject of an inter-imperialist gangbang from all sides, and it only survived to form the Soviet Union with the development of a strong, renewed Red Army, big in bulk and in equipment. And socialist revolutions in the future will also need to have this: they'll need a Red Army, Red Navy and Red Air Force. And communists NOW should think about how this needs to be developed and need to learn strategy and need to be active within military circles (although, of course, in the imperial core the military is a much clearer peon of international capital than in the global south, so things are harder in this stance). Socialism here, now and in the future will certainly be striked with the combined forces of capital tumbling down on any form of organized proletariat. This happens to countries contrary to the imperialist USAmerican order, socialist or not: it imposed a military dictatorship in Cambodia in 1970, it couped Chile in 1973, it annihilated Grenada in 1983, it helped oust Aristide in Haiti in 2004, it destroyed Libya in 2011 - not counting many others. This means that developing a strong, truly proletarian armed force and developing means to defend it long term beyond that - ICBMs, and, of course, following the correct Korean path, even nuclear missiles - are crucial for the establishment of socialist states. And only when socialism is triumphant or on its way to triumph may these rhetorical and physical defenses of socialism be dismantled. Or only if the capitalist world surrenders all of it at the same time. However, believe me: they won't. As such, i'd say that in the 21st century, Lenin's little formula can be adapted to: Communism is Soviet power + electrification + ballistic missiles, in a gross simplification. The basis, the development and the defense.

[heedzhee-art]

My old edits of Ukraine wearing a more accurate (simplified) traditional costume in comparison to the Sharovarshchyna-like clothes she has on in the original

Sharovarshchyna is basically pseudo-ethnic clothing that has nothing to do with Ukrainian national wear, and only pretends to be ethnic through kitsch elements. Sooo... something like this:

Sharovarshchyna:

Cheap, thin fabric, often glossy. Eye-straining red + white colour combination. Large and very vibrant flowers on the clothes, sometimes glued on. Generally very saturated colours, plastic-looking flower crowns that have no usage in traditional rituals or holidays. Often very low in details, minor accessories like a single necklace. Men often depicted wearing vibrant red boots (symbol of femininity? most of the time brides would wear those). Has nothing to do with Ukrainian heritage. A caricature, theatrical costume popularized in the late 19th century, later endorsed during the soviet era, when russification was especially violent, and only the "correct" showcasing of Ukrainian things wasn't persecuted. Still used by Ukrainians as a scenical costume for the very purpose it was created - because it's cheap, and easier to dance in.

"Sharovarshchyna" comes from the word "sharovary" which is the name of the stereotypical loose Cossack pants

Traditional Ukrainian costume:

Mostly muted colour scheme. Dark red, black and white often used as dominant colours, with details of other tones with higher saturation. Many elements vary depending on the region and occasion. Typically linen or thick cotton fabric. Detailed decorative embroidered elements have spiritual and symbolic meanings. Flower crown-like headwear worn by women during holidays and ceremonies (like weddings). Decorative tassels and fringe are often used on sleeves, hems, and headpieces to add texture and flair.

Also! Aprons, scarves, sashes, belts, and a lot of different headwear! (⁠っ⁠.⁠❛⁠ ⁠ᴗ⁠ ⁠❛⁠.⁠)⁠っ

edit: for additional context, the second picture showcases wedding crowns and hats

Also some bonus examples of modern Ukrainian ethno-fashion ↓

Thanks for reading. I plan to do a more elaborate post with illustrations about Ukrainian traditional wear sometime in the future 🙏

[foone]

Many people have been asking me "what's hdg" because I've reblogged memes about it a lot as of late, so I've been meaning to write a Big Post about the question of "What is Human Domestication Guide?"

Well, it's simple. I can explain it in one sentence:

In Soviet Future, House Plant Owns You!

(I'll write a real post later. This is another hdg shitpost. I'm sorry)

[psychotrenny]

If psuedo-progressives with incoherent politics weren't so consistently anti-communist, I could easily imagine a movement of people latching onto Soviet-styled retrofuturism as the aesthetic they base their politics around. Not even actual Soviet art mind you, but taking up various Western caricatures and going "yeah this rules". It's almost sad they we'll never see posts about "building a tankiepunk future" or have people making tweets like

[tsatsked]

Lore details I've noticed: Farewell Rayashki event

As always that's mostly Russian/USSR/Slavic stuff and some translations, feel free to add anything. I've also made a post about Silver Knot lore details

Obviosly, spoiler warning

Alenka - a USSR chocolate type produced since 1965, they are quite soft and sweet and still popular among kids and adults

The playground is quite typical for the time period. The drawings and sunflowers might be Vila’s and kids’ work. It’s not very clear if the graffiti is made by someone inspired by hip-hop culture or is August’s failed attempt at scribbling out his name, judging by “А” and “Г” as 1st and 3rd letters. The only thing I’d add here is more scraped parts recycled into playground constructions

Ijirak, Kikituk, Qiqirn - creatures from Inuit folklore (as far as I know they are not known in native Siberian folklore). I haven’t found information about Hoituk

The Russian word for “most” means “best” in the phrase “the most “most”” (“самый-самый”)

“It was only by luck that we found the runium. For over 60 years, people here have worked together to make it what it is now” - Vila. If the events happen in 60s-80s (judging by the overall vibe), than the last time reverse was at 1977 and Rayashki started to grow from a village to a town at 1917 or later. It means the town exported runium for all the Soviet years.

⬆️ EDIT: Silver Knot (Windsong's story) confirms it actually happens in 80s-90s

Most of the sighs say “For Better Future”, “Welcome to Rayashki” and “Welcome Zeno’s Military Institute”

The room in which Windsong stays is Soviet af. There are an old TV with a lens, cool bookshelf and tiles that surprised me. They’re common for public and liminal spaces but not so much for the living ones. Maybe they’re chosen because they endure harsh Artic climate better that wood or linoleum

EDIT: the TV looks like KVN-49 model, produced in 1949—1962

“It must be Kikituk! But their closest habitat should be Kong Kalrs Land, hundreds of kilometres away”. Kong Karls Land - a group of island of Svalbard archipelago, Norway. As @vingler-mirror point out in their post, Rayashki is likely based on Pyramiden town owned by USSR on the same archipelago

Природа это числа и черты - “Nature is numbers and lines” Природа это мозаика цветов - “Nature is a mosaic of colours”

“Mutant Kikituk from Olga area! You should be at the Olga Strait, hunting for migrating salmon and whales, not here!” - excuse me OLGA STRAIT!? THE ONE NEAR JAPAN!?

Poneva/ponyova - an element of Russian (Eastern Slavic?) female clothing worn on top of the main skirt of the dress. I believe there was either a mistranslation in Needles and Loaves message where Raisa said “poneva dress”, either she meant the whole outfit

Samodiva - Their name is feminine and can be roughly translated as “self-wonder”, but that’s another word for vila the creature from Western and Southern Slavic mythology similar to Eastern Slavic rusalka/mavka

Other stuff I’ve noticed:

The town seems to have a big arcanist population, if not most of them are arcanists. An arcanist right is applicable to them and all Vila’s known students are arcanists (if the kids are arcanists, their parents and grandparents are arcanists too)

The people of Rayashki seem to come from different places, and it makes sense with Pyramiden's history (EDIT: the workers were mostly from a western region of Ukraine). Pasono’s first name seems to be obscure and I’ve found only a surname mostly known in America. Patrik’s name is more popular name in other countries, and it make me to believe his ancestors might be foreigners. Bogina’s name comes from Southern Slavic languages

Rayashki is very communistic compared to the rest of USSR. Maybe it’s the town’s history, citizens’ temperament, small town’s size, seclusion and big self sufficiency combined. EDIT: the town's athmosphere conctasts with the period of USSR where people start feel more positive about the world around and capitalism with it

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson 11.15.24

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition.

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

[loving-n0t-heyting]

so there are a bunch of racists for whom mugabes greatest crime in the (eventual) implementation of radical land reform without compensation was the killing of several white farmers (and, if our interlocutor is willing to grant that their lives might matter, too, their largely black farmhands) in the process. i wont disagree that this was pretty bad; it should definitely feature in any list of of "the crimes of robert mugabe." but by far the greater crime in the reform efforts, i would think, is that the farmland was in the main transferred to small landholders with minimal training or ability to maintain the farms at their previous levels of efficiency, leading to mass famine and death for the native population. this bane to the ppl of zimbabwe, frankly, seems a lot more serious of a crime than orders of magnitude fewer dead directly in the confrontations involved in the seizure

now, if our racist objector is of an anticommunist bent (as many are!) and is particularly stupid/disingenuous (same!), the mass deaths resulting from this downgrade in agricultural productivity will likely be chalked up as another "crime of communism" typical of commie efforts at revolutionary agricultural transformation. the obvious intended points of comparison being, ofc, the great leap forward and collectivisation of farming in the early soviet union, in spite of the fact that these were (profoundly regrettable, frequently to the point of virtually criminal) consequences of the INDUSTRIALISATION and MODERNISATION of the chinese and soviet agricultural sectors, respectively, ie the complete opposite of the industrial retrogression seen under mugabe. these were not the birth pangs of the society of the future, they were the considerably less excusable pangs of a newborn deciding it didnt like the look of the outside world and doing its best to crawl back to the warm comfort of the womb

but what is really striking is that among those who will agree with our racists fundamental objection to the nature of post-2000 zibabwe land reform is... julius malema, head of the marxist leninist "economic freedom fighters" party in south africa, whose response when his (very similar) stated land reform and agricultural ambitions are compared to mugabes is basically that his goals (the ones that struck nearly half the population of zimbabwe with hunger) were noble but his methods (which killed maybe 300) were inexcusable. strange bedfellows!

[teeth--thief]

Google Drive full of book PDFs about Chernobyl

Link to the Google Drive if you don't want to click the title: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kscKFciW6almJA8p-0sUQPO3c0A4AQYe

Note: It will be updated regularly - for as long as I'll be able to find/get new things =) So far I've compiled 41 books in three languages.

Just to repeat what I said in the first post: I'm open to any requests or suggestions or even PDFs themselves, if someone wants to share theirs from their collection. Message me, send me an ask, throw a rock through my window - whatever you prefer, just please, do it yourself because I'm too scared to message anyone, thanks. No fiction - that's the only rule. Any language is welcome - if you want me to look for a certain book in the language of your choice, I'll do that. If you have a book in language other than English, I'd love to add it to the Drive! If you have a better version of whatever PDF I've already got, then I'd be more than happy to do a swap.

Now, some of my reasoning, if anyone's interested: first of all, I think it's important for everyone to be able to access stuff like this. Think of it as a library, minus the "give these back" part. Secondly, I get soooo mad when people are like haha, found this super rare, basically impossible to find, very expensive book! ...I shall now keep it exclusively to myself. Ma'am, you're ruining the vibe and stalling everyone's hobby research but I guess you do you...

List of all the books (under the cut):

In English:

Voices from Chernobyl - Alexievich S.

Chernobyl Reactor Accident - Source Term

Chernobyl - Insight from the Inside - Dr. Chernousenko V.M.

How It Was - Dyatlov A.S.

(ENG+RUS) Chernobyl Booklet

Chernobyl: The Devastation, Destruction and Consequences of the World’s Worst Radiation Accident - Fitzgerald I.

Final Warning. The Legacy of Chernobyl - Gale R.P.

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster - Higginbotham A.

INSAG-1

INSAG-7

Interesting Chernobyl - 100 Symbols

From Chernobyl To Fukushima - Karpan N.

Manual for Survival. A Chernobyl Guide to the Future - Kate Brown

Chernobyl. Confessions of a Reporter - Kostin I.

The Politics of Invisibility. Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl - Kuchinskaya O.

Memories - Kupnyi A.

Chernobyl 01:23:40 - The Incredible True Story of the World’s Worst Nuclear Disaster - Leatherbarrow A.

Chernobyl Notebook - Medvedev G.

No Breathing Room - Medvedev G.

Chernobyl Record - The Definitive History of the Chernobyl Catastrophe - Mould R. F.

Wormwood Forest - A Natural History of Chernobyl - Mycio M.

Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl - Petryna A.

Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy - Plokhy S.

Ablaze - Story of Chernobyl - Read P.P.

Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry - Schmid S. D.

Chernobyl: A Documentary Story - Shcherbak I.

The Vienna Report

Chernobyl - Crime Without Punishment - Yaroshinskaya A.A.

In Russian:

Chernobyl: Kak eto bylo. Preduprezhdeni - Kopchinsky, Steinberg

Chernobyl. Tak eto bylo. Vzglyad Iznutri - Voznyak Ya. Troitskiy N.

Лучевая болезнь человека (очерки) - Гуськова А.К., Байсоголов Г.Д.

Чернобыль. Как это было - Дятлов А.С.

Чернобыль: 30 лет спустя - Кр��вчук Н.В.

Живы - Купный А.

Чернобыль - Щербак Ю.

(ONLY Pages 367-383) Чернобыль, 10 лет спустя. Неизбежность или случайность?

KGB files - pre and post accident (includes additional information in Ukrainian)

In Polish: 

Jak to było - Diatłov A.S.

Czarnobyl - Plokhy S.

Czarnobyl - Sekuła P.

Katastrofa w Czarnobylu - Sekuła P.

Czarnobyl. Od katastrofy do procesu - Siwiński W.

[neroushalvaus]

Tumblr in the 60s – Part 2

Part 1 / Deleted Scenes

💁🏼‍♀️brigittebardots Follow

anyone want to get fake married so i can get the pill to slut around

💋 marrymetwiggy Follow

Just say you have painful monthlies, I heard it works if you have a nice doctor!

💫 treatmetendermaureen Follow

Remember you still should use the sheet whenever possible. Stay safe ♡

1087 notes

♒ let-the-sunshine-in Follow

i think there's something wrong with me, i'm just so sleepy all the time, it's not fair

👭 marvelettesofficial Follow

That's because you spend all your nights listening to radio luxembourg

♒ let-the-sunshine-in Follow

i heard nothing last night so i built an antenna out of poultry net, iron wire and bits of tin. i cut my fingers and our family chickens ran away

☁️ ankin-vaimo Follow

A small price to pay for some music.

♒ let-the-sunshine-in Follow

the antenna fell apart before the german guy stopped talking

34 notes

🗣 ilovejohnlennon-deactivated19660729

me: chilling

my brain: if you were shot and weren't sure whether you'd live or die should you call the cops to make sure your murderer gets caught or call the ambulance to increase your chance of survival

me: what

🗣 elviskneesofficial-deactivated19631119

There should be a number that'd reach both of those

🕺 elvisherselvis Follow

That number already exists. It's been used in my city for like a two decades.

🏆 petebest-or-bust Follow

🕺 elvisherselvis Follow

Fuck you I'm British.

🪛 patrickwhoghton Follow

Oh my G, this post from -62 sounds so prophetic now that they're trying to make the 911 thing catch on, where's that jagger meme

🖖 spock-in-tardis Follow

🕺 elvisherselvis Follow

This is literally not gift of prophecy. I told you back when this post was first made that this number has already existed in UK for years. It was obviously going to spread elsewhere, even US was bound to catch on at some point.

🏆 petebest-or-bust Follow

you are still here?? keeping an eye on this post??

💋 marrymetwiggy Follow

you're so grumpy @elvisherselvis maybe you should phone the emergency number and get a wahhh-mbulance

98,9 t. notes

📼 bisexualbarbaradane Follow

my date: Oh I listen to folk as well!

me: That's so cool! Who are your favourites?

my date: I'm sooo into Bob Dylan.

me:

my date: Is everything okay?

me, stuffing jelly babies into my purse: I have to go, like, right now, immediately, sorry

#it's okay if you liked dylan before he became the judas he is #but you can't call yourself a folk fan if you still support him #ugghh i hate him #electric guitar using lil bitch #sigh #jelly baby meme #bob dylan critical // #anti bob dylan // #bob dylan hate //

2 notes

🛸 premisendgame Follow

Cock and balls, I'm watching this previously banned american film where an american man is trying to fuck a soviet spy (played by famously very russian Greta Garbo) by offering her champagne and he is like "have you never had champagne?" and Greta is like "never 🥺 only goat's milk and a ration of vodka in the army" and the tv screen freezed and was like "ERROR!! CHAMPAGNE HAS BEEN SERVED IN SOVIET UNION SINCE 1936" I'm 😂😂😂

🪐 stalincredible Follow

You Americans will say anything to make Soviet stuff look silly

🛸 premisendgame Follow

Where do you think I am watching soviet tv from?? Or did I miss the memo where americans have the monopoly on joking about their own damn country??

322 notes

🥁 ringoforpresident Follow

"In future there will be telephones you can take with you anywhere" I can't even fucking listen to Radio Luxembourg without building a goddamn satellite, sending it to space, reciting spells and prayers, and sticking the radio out of the window at 2am EET. And even then it needs to be snowing for it to work because the radio wave fairies like snow or some shit

♒ let-the-sunshine-in Follow

preach

540 notes

[peregrine-coast]

Milk Bar: my sci-fi RPG set in a post-Soviet Poland is now live on Kickstarter!

Hey folks!!

Milk Bar is a sci-fi tabletop roleplaying game set in an alternate-timeline, post-Soviet Poland. After the Soviets grew in power, their ultimate clash with Capital left your city in ruin. All you can do now is gather your fellow Communards, salvage whatever you can, and build your Milk Bar.

Based on RPGs like Cairn, Mausritter, and Mothership, and video games like Disco Elysium and Control, Milk Bar is a game about the post-collapse and rebuilding.

A 100-page book featuring:

Quick, simplified rules in the old school tradition

A toolkit for generating a retro-futuristic, alternate-timeline post-Soviet Communist Poland

Funnel Rules which have your group of upstart Communards find and take back a Milk Bar from the grasp of Capital. Start at level 0 and Cut Your Milk Teeth. 

Unique progression system tied to basebuilding. Want to stitch up those wounds? You better build an Infirmary and find a Doctor

Abandoned Soviet Superstructures containing reality-bending Future Tech deep within

A Bestiary melding Polish and Slavic mythology with classic science fiction

Solo Rules. Become the Biggest Communism Builder of the year '24!

Gorgeous production values: high-quality, uncoated paper and an exposed, yellow thread binding. Full of graphic design work from Eryk Sawicki (me!) and art from SADGHOBLIN

Pierogi

[mariacallous]

In the 1990s, the feel-good first decade after communism’s implosion, headlines in Central Europe were dominated by the likes of Vaclav Havel, the charming playwright-turned-Czech president who championed civic democracy. Yet, from the start, extreme-right rabble-rousers and brooding nativists lurked in the margins. Decades of Soviet rule had reinforced illiberal attitudes that surfaced in my discussions with ordinary people as I crisscrossed the region as a young correspondent, eventually writing a book about the far right in post-communist Central Europe.

At the time, I believed that Central Europe’s entry into the European Union, which was still far off and uncertain, would nullify the region’s most destructive tendencies. After all, the bloc had accomplished this for postwar Germany, Greece, Portugal, and Spain—all of which had emerged from radical dictatorships to become healthy democracies. Countries didn’t revert to despotism after acceding to the EU. Right?

But in Hungary the unthinkable happened: A state that jumped through all of the hoops to join the EU in 2004 commenced a rapid decline into authoritarianism just six years later. Other member states have endured stretches of democratic backsliding, including Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, and, notably, Poland during the 2015 to 2023 Law and Justice government. But their political systems and societies were resilient enough to fight back and depose strongmen. Hungary did not rise from the mat.

Two new books grant us vivid insight into Hungary’s descent into dictatorship—a feat pulled off so skillfully by Prime Minister Viktor Orban that it inspires awe—and uncover the mechanisms that made the regime’s rise possible, even as the undemocratic country has remained in a bloc designed to promote and deepen the liberal character of its members.

In Embedded Autocracy: Hungary in the European Union, Hungarian political scientists Andras Bozoki and Zoltan Fleck dissect the many-headed hydra of the Orban regime. Orban’s Hungary isn’t an old-school dictatorship that snatched power by a coup or jails opposition figures. As this astute book details, it possesses all the trappings of democracy, including regular, monitored elections; a multiparty opposition; and thus far, the peaceful transfer of power. Today, non-Fidesz mayors rule in the largest, western-most cities such as Budapest, Szeged, Pecs, and Gyor. For most Hungarians, this is evidence enough that their country is a democracy, regardless of the diagnosis of political scientists. This achievement is Orban’s magic, which relies not on spells but rather on the ruthless application of power.

Born in rural Hungary in 1963, Orban—a self-proclaimed “illiberal” politician—was once a liberal activist. He became an anti-communist student leader in the 1980s while studying law in Budapest and even took up a research fellowship at Oxford University on George Soros’s dime. Along with other activists, he founded the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz) in 1988 as a Western-minded movement to promote freedom and democracy. (Bozóki was formerly a member of Fidesz but left the party in 1993.)

Orban has orchestrated every Fidesz twist and turn since, his keen populist instincts charting the course rather than any ideology. Between 1993 and 1994, he jerked the rudder to the right, and in 1998, Orban and Fidesz took the country’s highest office for the first time at the head of a center-right coalition. The Orban government, offering a taste of what the future held, stretched propriety to the limit by rallying the media to its cause, promoting loyalists in the state apparatus, and ingratiating itself with deep-pocketed bankers and industrialists.

In 2002, Orban committed a rare gaffe that resulted in defeat: playing more forcefully to the emerging middle class than to the much larger pool of older, uneducated, poor, rural voters—those ravaged by International Monetary Fund (IMF) and EU-driven market reforms. This group either shied from the polls or voted socialist left. It was not a mistake Orban would make twice.

Fidesz was out of office for the next eight years, and by the late aughts, Orban had transformed it from a conservative party to a populist vehicle that appealed not to a class but to a nation. He purged Fidesz of critical minds, centralized it around himself, and polarized Hungary’s discourse by casting political opponents as the nation’s enemies.

By 2010—six years after Hungary secured EU membership—Orban was raring to pounce. Bozoki and Fleck, though critical of Fidesz’s first turn at governance, argue that the descent into autocracy fell into place that year when Fidesz staged a spectacular comeback with a supermajority in parliament. Orban wasted no time in employing this mandate to hollow out the judiciary, rewrite Hungary’s legal code, and promulgate a new constitution. New laws made it harder for upstart parties to win seats and even easier for a large party, like Fidesz, to capture a legislative supermajority with less of the vote. And the refashioned legal code saw to it that Fidesz’s cronyism and subsequent amassing of power fell close enough within the law that it would not be sanctioned domestically.

Today, Hungary is a flourishing dictatorship. The regime has curtailed press freedom, marginalized the opposition, dismantled democratic checks and balances, controlled civil society, fixed election laws, and neutered criticism—ensuring that only extraordinary events, not elections, could oust it from power.

In Bozoki and Fleck’s telling, Orban’s genius was that he intuited exactly how Hungary was susceptible to this turn. The country possessed next to no democratic tradition before 1989. After the Soviets’ brutal crushing of the 1956 uprising, when Hungarians challenged the Stalinist regime, they fell in line again—in contrast to the Poles who fought communism’s enforcers tooth and nail. These “deep-seated attitudes” continued into the 21st century and contributed to Orban’s ability to entrench authoritarian rule.

“He could change the regime because society was not much concerned with the political system,” the authors write. “What people learned over decades and even centuries was that political regimes … were always external to people’s everyday lives.”

Rather than heavy-handed repression, Orban relied on self-censorship, suppliance, and patronage to keep his subjects in line. Those who toed the line were rewarded with jobs, directorships, and contracts. And, of course, he leaned on his own special cocktail of nationalist rhetoric: “He has provided identity props for a disintegrated society using tropes in line with historical tradition: a Christian bulwark against the colonialism of the West, the pre-eminent, oldest nation in the Carpathian basin, a nation of dominance, a self-defending nation surrounded by enemies,” the authors write.

Fidesz received a tremendous windfall in the aughts when the left-liberal government botched an economic transition based on neoliberal principles, rashly introducing free-market conditions to a society that was woefully unprepared for their fallout. The government created ever greater wealth disparities as it followed the “shock therapy” prescriptions of Western institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, as well as the EU. In 2007, Hungary’s own debt crisis sent the country into a tailspin, a meltdown that the global economic crisis turbocharged the next year.

The socialist-liberal coalition of those years heaped blunders on top of blunders—such as the prime minister’s recorded admission that he lied to win the 2006 election—before crumbling. So thoroughly did the liberal partner in the coalition self-destruct that for a decade afterward, Hungary fielded no liberal party at all.

In the eyes of many Hungarians, the economic collapse discredited market capitalism, and liberal democracy with it. They understood it as one bundle that foreign actors had foisted upon them. Twenty years after democracy’s debut, the population welcomed a strongman who claimed to cater to “Hungarian interests” rather than those of elites in Brussels and Washington.

It is in the name of “national unification,” Fidesz’s blanket legitimation for nearly all of its reforms, that the party re-nationalized much of the industrial sector, as well as banking, media, and energy. Over the 2010s, Bozoki and Fleck write, Orban would decimate civil society and end “autonomy in public education, universities, science, professional bodies, and public law institutions.” Under these conditions, it is impossible to call any election free or fair, even if ballot boxes aren’t being stuffed.

Bozoki and Fleck’s fine book is buttressed by David Jancsics’s narrower Sociology of Corruption: Patterns of Illegal Association in Hungary, another work that understands egregious corruption as integral to the regime. At the book’s start, Jancsics, a Hungarian-born sociologist at San Diego State University, makes a simple observation: that corruption in Hungary today is on a scale unthinkable in the Soviet era.

This is quite a claim—in the 1990s, one of the most repeated reasons for Central Europe’s disgust with the Soviet system was its prevalent corruption. But the author backs it up. Although graft is still despised in Hungary today, because most people don’t benefit from it, Jancsics makes the case that it has once again been accepted as the way things are done.

Since 2010, Jancsics writes, “the Fidesz regime has effected a radical transformation of grand corruption patterns … in which complex corrupt networks are professionally designed and managed by the very top of the political elite.” Networks dominated by members of Orban’s inner circle now control not only political institutions, but also the economy, and “uninterruptedly siphon off a huge amount of public resources from the government system.”

These networks of Orban’s cronies and relatives are protected by a thick layer of shell companies that disguise the real owners of the businesses that profit from their proximity to government, Jancsics writes. And like the changes to Hungary’s political structure, the regime has fashioned laws to make its corruption legal.

Jancsics uses the example of the country’s $2.5 billion tobacco industry to illustrate this stripe of corruption. In 2012, the rubber-stamp Hungarian parliament passed a law that turned the sector into a state monopoly—purportedly to stop underage smoking—and decreed that all cigarette sales must occur under new concessions contracts. The government then created the national Tobacco Nonprofit Trade Company to oversee the distribution of new licenses. The company doled these out to members of networks close to the government. Two years later, another law passed stipulating that shops could only buy tobacco products from a state-owned intermediary. According to Jancsics, investigative journalists revealed that one person—Lorinc Meszaros, the then-mayor of Orban’s hometown—stood behind much of this scheme, which more than 500 shell companies helped obscure. Today, Meszaros is Hungary’s wealthiest man.

The crumbs of this hugely lucrative operation trickled down to lower-level party clientele. “It seems the legislators used the restructuring and reregulation of the whole tobacco market not only for the benefit of a few powerful oligarchs or proxy oligarchs but also for rewarding a large number of party clientele,” Jancsics writes. “Family members, spouses, siblings, parents, in-laws, friends, or even neighbors of people linked to the governing party won several concessions.”

The EU has not only watched this level of corruption unfold. As Bozoki and Fleck show, Brussels has been complicit in Hungary’s metamorphosis, supplying the funds to grease the regime’s operations. Like all of the EU’s Central European members, Hungary has profited immensely from EU cohesion funds, which are designed to bring the economies of weaker member states up to scratch. Between 2014 and 2020, Hungary received around $34 billion in EU funds, which Bozoki and Fleck argue has only solidified the ruling elite’s hold on power.

The EU finally got tougher in 2018, when it sanctioned Budapest for breaching the bloc’s core values. The following year, the European People’s Party, the European Parliament’s grouping of center-right parties, finally expelled Fidesz from its ranks. Over the past three years, the EU has frozen more than $31 billion to Hungary, including COVID-19 recovery funds, over rule of law deficits.

But this hasn’t forced Budapest to significantly modify any of its most flagrant abuses. Although there were loud objections from within the European Parliament, Hungary took over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union in July. Orban has continued to veto EU aid to Ukraine and increased its reliance on Russian fuels at a time when the bloc is striving to quit Russian imports. Perhaps more than any moves Hungary has made as council president, Orban’s friendliness to the Kremlin in exchange for cheap energy has weakened the EU as a foreign policy actor.

The EU is paying an enormous price for indulging Orban, not least by sanctioning a template for populist takeovers elsewhere in Europe. The bloc’s clout in terms of its ability to shape commerce, values, and policy coordination is obviously not as great as I once imagined. Hungary’s brazen disrespect and power plays have weakened it even further.

Now, the EU as we know it is under siege across Europe, where Orban allies hold or share power in the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Slovakia, Austria, and Croatia. These rightists want an EU with fewer powers and less centralization—a Europe of nations—and many look to Hungary for leadership. Even U.S. President-elect Donald Trump pays homage to Orban, whom he has called “fantastic” and a “great leader.” These other pretenders will hopefully come and go—as ruling parties and their leaders do in democracies—but history teaches us that Hungary’s embedded autocracy will not disappear anytime soon.

[hero-israel]

A rant that I just can't post on main but think you might appreciate:

If the left had sided with the Jewish people and mourned our dead with us, even if it couldn't prevent the massacre itself, dayeinu

If the left had extended measured sympathy even if it had not been righteously angry and grieved on our behalf, dayeinu

If the left had just remained silent even if it did not extend measured solidarity, dayeinu

If the left had denied the atrocities against us and throughout Jewish history, even though they could have just remained silent, dayeinu

If the left had engaged in some sick quiet pleasure at our dead for having deserved it, even though they could have just looked away and pretended it wasn't real, dayeinu

If the left had cheered our deaths loudly even though they could have kept that within antisemitic enclaves, dayeinu

If the left had radicalized a generation of activists against us, even though they could have kept it to just being bold talk like they do with everything else, dayeinu

If the left had kept their radical "advocacy" to being in words and marches even though they could have stuck with ugly beliefs, dayeinu

If the left had contented itself with property destruction and defacement rather than escalating to physically attacking Jews in public, dayeinu.

But unfortunately, now we are facing the radicalization of a generation into physically violent antisemitism, where attacks and rockets launched at Israeli Jews are being justified because they're in Israel and physical attacks on diaspora Jews are being justified because *something something* Israel, Holocaust inversion and genocidal rhetoric is rampant, and angry mobs are threatening Jewish students on campus.

I'd love to say that there are going to be a lot of extremely ashamed leftists in the future, but I'm sure they'll just deny it the same way they casually deny the Holocaust and Soviet pogroms now.

Not much to add to this one. You have a way with words, though I'm sorry it's necessary in these circumstances.