#soviet writings

[soviets-writing-shenanigans]

Minoshi Drabble

Had an idea and went with it.

"Your Goddess is real... and She hates you." The priest shook his head in denial... but Minoshi could see the look in his eyes. He knew it was true. By the Void... was it delicious... She strode closer to the fallen Elezen, blood dripping from her armor and her greatsword. The rest of the fanatics were dead. None of them stood a chance. "She will strike you down!" The priest yelled at her, his voice shaking with doubt. "She will protect the r-righteous!" "The Fury has fought my better half, lost... and enjoyed it," Minoshi replied with a vindictive sneer. "How could you, a murderous fucking coward, ever compare to her?" "My life's work is in Her name!" "Your life's work... makes Her puke." The priest tried to crawl away... only for her sabaton to rest on his gut. The darkside took her blade in a two-handed grip, the tip aimed at his heart. "Halone despises everything you do... everything you have done," she continued, relishing the the despair filling his eyes. "All you stand for goes against what She believes in. And She hates you for it." She saw the moment his soul broke... and it was beautiful. "She will always hate you." Minoshi drove her blade down, piercing his heart.

[areallivegirl7]

Brainwashing doesn’t always look like this

Sometimes it looks like this

[buckingham-ashtray]

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (1980), S02E03, The Tiger Hunt

Your violin cradled under his chin and the bow held gingerly in his fingertips,

He could not play,

But the strings keened as the instrument kissed his cheek for you.

[fromtherift]

Like I can’t believe that the Antaam splitting away from the Qun had such little political impact on the world and the only reason it happened is because they needed to give the player characters someone to kill without us thinking about it too much.

Reminds me of an hbomberguy video I watched where he was talking about fallout new vegas and was comparing how new vegas treated supermutants versus how 3 treat them. NV gave them life- personalities, histories, emotions, background- while in 3 they were a stupid brute of an animal to shoot down and move on.

The qunari had the potential to be endlessly fascinating as a culture that stands so aside from any other in Thedas. Even if you wanted to go down the brutal military dictatorship storyline- which you could do well by commenting on individuals within that story- the leads chose to instead make the qunari into fodder instead of developing something interesting. It’s a very conservative, “they are bad because they are not us” mentality on both ends that I’m sick and tired of

[pretty-face-breaker]

Clarity

Emir makes a friend.

cw. infection, fever, aftermath of torture, hallucinations, forced to strip and shower in front of someone

—

The fever came in waves, like the heat that rises off tank metal left under the sun too long.

His body, prone beneath the thin wool blanket, never cooled. Sweat had soaked into the mattress beneath him, so long and so deeply that the fabric clung to his skin like a second, fetid hide. He couldn’t shift without peeling himself free of it, and even that was agony. 

The lashings hadn’t healed. Not properly, at least. Some had crusted over with yellow at the edges, others still wept, angry red slashes that stuck to the blanket every time he tried to shift, tearing open again with a whisper of wet fabric and a delayed shock of pain.

And the fucking brand.

It burned hot on his palm, even when untouched, throbbed like it had its own pulse. The flesh around it was puckered, split open in places, swollen with heat. 

Infection had bloomed inside him like a mushroom cloud. His skull boiled with it. His lips cracked with it. It stripped the sense from the world. He could barely blink without hallucinating or wondering what was real and what wasn’t. 

For days he hadn’t left the bed, not even to piss. He’d barely even spoken. The barracks carried on around him with voices, boots, drills. But his body had sunk under the noise like the ocean, muffled and far away.

A soldier had come once. Then again. Not Pavel. A different one with short-cropped dark hair, a round face, pale skin gone ruddy from cold, and a uniform hanging too loose at the sleeves. Smart eyes. He’d brought bread first, then a small cube of stewed meat wrapped in a napkin without saying a word either time. Just crouched near the bed, nudged the food into Emir’s reach, and left.

At first, Emir thought it was a test.

Then he thought maybe the soldier assumed he didn’t speak Russian. Or English. Something about his face—brown and sun-creased, foreign—made people speak past him.

He'd entertained the idea of saying something, asking his name or offering something in return. If he could keep the man coming, he might survive the winter. Maybe sneak rations. Maybe hide when Pavel came near. Maybe, if he got lucky, get someone to intervene.

But that had been days ago. Before the fever hollowed him out and turned his brain into a soup of fog and fire.

Pavel came once, or maybe not. Maybe it was a dream, the same way his limbs sometimes floated off his body in the middle of the night. But it felt real. He remembered Pavel crouching by his side, the same way the quiet soldier had, and sneering something ugly about his brand.

"How’s the mark, little dog? Did it keep you warm at night?"

Then a hand poking the wound. Emir had flinched so hard he’d nearly rolled off the bed. Pavel, if he really had been there, had laughed at him or breathed in mockery. He hadn’t been able to tell. Only felt contempt there. 

—

That night, when the world was just blurred outlines and every inch of his skin burned with its own private sun, Emir felt the mattress dip.

He flinched and tried to sit up, but his limbs wouldn't work. His hands trembled at the wrist. His back screamed.

"Shh. Don’t move."

That voice, and not Pavel. The quiet soldier. Again.

The rustle of a coat pocket followed by something pressed into his hand. What looked like a blister pack of chalky white tablets. He couldn’t read the text scored on them and, for all he knew, they could be sedatives or poison. 

Then, the soldier offered a canteen. The water was lukewarm and stank of tin. He drank it all without asking. 

He didn’t care if it killed him or melted his stomach from the inside. He wanted the boiling agony to stop.

Next, two dull blue pills that were rounded at the edge. Sleeping tablets, he noted and relaxed a little. The soldier pressed them into his palm, then, once Emir took them, carefully tucked the rest under his pillow with a warning look and a finger to his lip.

Emir nodded. "Spasibo," he rasped.

The soldier's eyes flicked toward him, then away again without so much as a smile. Then, he vanished back into the rows of beds.

—

It happened again the next night. And the night after that.

By the third night, the fever had broken.

Emir could breathe again and even think a little. The pain hadn’t gone, but it had numbed into a deep, angry ache that lived in his back and legs and palm. His lashes had begun to scab over and the flesh around the brand had stopped oozing.

The bruises on his jaw had turned a strange greenish-brown. His ribs were still sore when he breathed, but it no longer felt like knives.

He started taking the sleeping pills without waiting to be told, keeping the remaining tablets hidden in the hem of his blanket. The soldier still came with food, water, then another stolen dose of something that must have been analgin or codeine phosphate. After those doses, the air stopped beating down on his injuries quite so viciously. 

No one else touched him. Maybe they were too busy. Maybe they thought he’d die on his own. Despite Levkin’s initiation, he still didn’t know what his role was supposed to be in this place—prisoner? conscript? 

Impressed asset, Levkin had said.

But Emir didn’t believe in impressment. He believed in being used, bled slowly, and kept alive just enough to scream.

It was the fourth morning when he half-dreamed of Beirut.

The smell of kibbeh nayyeh, his mother’s laugh in the kitchen, piano keys clinking under his fingers. His sister Layla trying to sing, and his father banging the table for rhythm. His arms were outstretched for a hug, his mother moving toward him, glowing in warm light—

—and then the air shifted.

His eyes snapped open.

The soldier was standing beside his bed, watching.

Emir froze. The light from the hallway cut across the soldier’s face, his tired eyes, a twitching jaw, one boot unlaced.

Emir blinked at him, breath shaky. "Ya luchshe. Bol’she ne nado." I’m better. You don’t need to bring more.

The soldier gave a small nod. Then, silently, reached into his pocket.

Not pills this time. Emir’s heart raced. It was a folded newspaper clipping.

He handed it to Emir and stepped back.

The paper was creased, faintly damp. The Cyrillic was bold and blocky, easy to read even through Emir’s bleary eyes. There was a photograph, blurred, but recognizable. Emir in a flight suit, arm in a sling, standing against a red wall—when had they taken that picture of him?

СИРИЙСКИЙ ПИЛОТ ПЕРЕХОДИТ НА СТОРОНУ СОВЕТСКОГО СОЮЗА Heroic defector from Western-aligned air force joins Soviet cause in a time of global tension. Officer Emir Suleiman cited moral clarity and international unity in his decision to reject imperialist servitude and embrace socialist brotherhood.

The color drained from his face. He held a long, mournful silence.

The soldier smiled but it was nowhere near the cruelty from Pavel. It was pitying. Rightfully so, Emir thought, staring slack-jawed at the newspaper. He really was a miserable son-of-a-bitch.

Emir held the newspaper like it might fly away if he let go. "Kak tebya zovut?" What’s your name?

The soldier hesitated, then leaned in and whispered, "Mikhail."

Emir nodded, lips dry. His mind spun in circles, trying to take in what it meant to be called a traitor in print, a tragic hero in fiction, and a thing to be beaten in secret. This wasn’t just prison. It was theater .

He looked back up. "Mne nuzhen drug." I need a friend. "Ya mogu delat' veshi... v obmen." I can do things. In return.

Mikhail tilted his head and thought for a moment. His eyebrows rose in a look of genuine consideration. Then he sniffed, wrinkled his nose, and waved his hand.

"Idi. Ty vonyaesh.” Get up. You stink.

Emir stared. Then, slowly, pushed the blanket back. When he stood, his knees trembled like a newborn foal’s, but they held. He had thought the first time he stood up since Pavel’s stupendous beating, he might have collapsed face-first.

—

They walked in silence, the barracks hallway dark enough that Emir kept to the wall, brushing one shoulder against the concrete for balance as his legs recalibrated to walking. His whole body was still stiff, like the tissue had set wrong around his bones.

Mikhail kept ahead of him by a few paces, not leading him like a prisoner but also not beside him either. It was unfamiliar and scared him a little. Emir didn’t know what kind of rules governed this kind of proximity, or if he was allowed to call it trust.

The showers were farther than Emir remembered. When they finally turned the corner past a low-slung supply alcove and two doorless changing rooms, he recognized the space. A single corridor of frosted concrete stalls, some cracked at the corners, tiled with chipped gray squares that looked like they hadn’t been properly scrubbed since Stalin was in power. 

At the far end, the heads: five rusted nozzles in a row, each leaking brown at the base where the pipe met the wall. The floor sloped inward to a disgusting slatted drain.

Mikhail cleared his throat quietly, then leaned against the peeling metal frame of the shower entrance. He looked embarrassed by the fact that he had to explain it.

“I have to see,” he said, English slow and slurred but clear enough. “Not because I want. You know this.”

Emir gave a weak nod and leaned one hand on the wall to catch his breath. He did know.

“If you run,” Mikhail continued, gesturing vaguely at the hall, “they kill me first. After they make... ehh... meat soup out of you. Your skin first.”

The corners of his mouth quirked grimly, but he wasn’t joking. Emir forced a breath through his nose, and gave another nod, smaller this time.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he muttered, rubbing one palm—the unbranded one—over the other wrist as though trying to warm it. “Even if I wanted to, where the hell would I go?”

Mikhail watched Emir closely, then shrugged one shoulder.

“You survive too much,” he said. “Maybe you survive that too.”

Then he turned slightly, hand over his eyes, but posture straight as a rod at the edge of the tiled space—clearly not joking about being ready to intervene if Emir so much as flinched the wrong direction.

Emir sighed and began to undress. The uniform stuck in places, to scabs and dried blood, the seams stiff with salt. He peeled the shirt off in increments, hissing under his breath each time it tugged across one of the lashes on his back, and when he finally managed to drop the trousers to the floor, he didn’t look down at the bruises blooming down his legs, nor the state of the wound on his palm.

He stepped under the showerhead without ceremony and twisted the knob.

The water sputtered for a moment. Then came out in a weak, lukewarm stream that turned cold almost immediately when it splashed against his skin.

He nearly sobbed from it. It was the first time in weeks that he had felt water that wasn’t snowmelt in a rag or the spit from a canteen. The heat that rose off his skin as the grime sloughed off made him tremble. His eyes burned. It took all his focus not to fall to his knees. He let the water wash over him, his eyes closed, forehead resting against the tile, breath fogging softly on the wall. It hurt—because it always hurt—the water cutting through the film of dirt and dried sweat, sliding into the raw cracks in his back, the weeping edges of his wounds. But he just grit his teeth and swallowed the sting.

He grabbed the small bar of soap sitting on a ledge and worked it over his chest, then his neck, arms, thighs, every inch of himself he could reach. His hands shook and the effort made his vision darken at the edges, but he finished the job. He wasn’t going to leave this place still smelling like fucking Pavel.

At one point, he risked a glance.

Mikhail hadn’t moved. Hand still over his eyes. Spine straight, one foot braced behind the other. Still giving him that thin layer of dignity, even when he couldn’t afford to demand it.

So Emir took his time.

When the water finally ran clear, or as clear as it was going to get, he reached down for the bundle of blood-stiffened fabric that he’d dropped on the floor before stepping in. But it wasn’t there. In its place, folded and squared neatly in the small recess carved into the wall beside the shower, was a clean uniform.

Standard-issue Soviet fatigues. One size too big.

Emir froze. The shock of it was sharper than the water.

He stared at the bundle for a moment too long, then looked toward Mikhail, who had kept his hand over his eyes. Obviously, he had moved just long enough to leave the uniform there. 

The corners of Emir’s eyes prickled. He reached for the fabric and clutched it to his chest, half-wrapped in the steam.

"Spasibo," he said softly.

Mikhail didn’t drop his hand, but he gave the faintest nod and, with a heavy accent, muttered, “You’re... welcome.”

By the time Emir dressed, his hands were steadier. The new uniform felt as wrong as the last one, like someone else’s skin, but it didn’t chafe his back and it didn’t stink with his weeks of misery.

As they walked back down the hall, quieter now, he kept glancing sidelong at Mikhail—who said nothing. Emir didn’t know what the damn man wanted. If anything. He hadn’t asked for gratitude. Hadn’t used the pills or the food or the clean clothes as leverage.

But Emir knew enough to recognize a kind of mercy when he saw it. 

He had no idea how long it would last, if Mikhail’s loyalties would hold, or if this kindness was just a way of salving some private guilt over watching Emir’s torture. But Emir was no longer entirely alone.

And for now, that was enough.

—

@straight-to-the-pain @heathenville @quirkykayleetam @yet-another-heathen  @undertheburrow​ @lektricfergus @punchhimagain @whumpasaurus101 @kakaboomc4 @alexmundaythrufriday @kixngiggles @rabbitdrabbles @whump-queen

[fairy-of-divorce]

I wonder if the typical English Harry Potter fanfiction is as batshit as Russian Harry Potter fanfiction. Maybe it's the selection bias, but I swear, the former seems so much more chill. Average English HP fanfic is like,

'This is a retelling of canon events with minor divergences and deeper psychological exploration of Draco Malfoy and his feelings for Hermione/Harry, 100k words of angst with a bittersweet happy ending' or 'This is an exploration of a character/time period that was only mentioned in passing in canon'

and the average Russian HP fanfic is like,

'Hi, my name is Harry Potter and I just found out that Dumbledore is an evil manipulative power-hungry psycho and Weasleys are his greedy lying spies who only ever wanted to use me for my fame and money, so I am now gonna befriend the Slytherins and the goblins and take my rightful place as Lord Potter-Black, because aristocrats are naturally more magically powerful and cool.

[universal-casey]

Ever since Musical Anon suggesting that the Sovime AU could be split into three parts, I’ve been really thinking about it lmao.

Like the reason I don’t have anything solid is because I could never figure out where to start. I know the end, and I know the beginning. But I always freeze at the middle. And I think the reason why is because I was trying to START at the middle.

Sovime AU is just as much of Soviet’s story as it is America’s. Two sides of the same coin, only one starts at the top and falls to the bottom, and one starts at the bottom and climbs to the top.

Not to mention @weirdestarrow ( @weirdestbooks ) practically shot me in the face with motivation because of their FANTASTIC fic, “A Moment of Reflection” like seriously check it out.

Plus, I think if I write out the AU I can work out the kinks and make a huge passion project out of it.

[farsight-the-char]

Warhammer OC idea:

Human perpetual living in the Tau Empire, supports the Greater Good, has no "game changing" info to give the Ethereal Caste because he has lived a very boring life, having gotten very good at avoiding major historical events since the mid 2000s.

Gives what advisement and historical references he has to the local Ethereals, and his advice is valued, but also prefers the simply life on a Sept World, working primarily as bartender.

I name him Jacob Donalds. Awakened to his Perpetual nature in the 1920s.

Friends with Detective Lightray (a Water Caste Detective who was experimented on by the Death Watch, somehow gained an unnantral longevity and healing as a result).

[justablix]

WAIT wait I figured it out. the reason every single modern adaptation fucks up irene adler by giving her romantic feelings for holmes (and vice versa) even though SCAN is about her trying to live a quiet live with the (non-holmes) man she loves and acd basically put a giant NO HETERO HE ADMIRED HER SKILL HE DIDNT LOVE HER warning sign at the beginning of SCAN is that not a single male director could imagine a man respecting a woman for her intelligence and skill without having romantic feelings for her. In this essay I will SCREAM

[applestorms]

if i may be a nerd for just a sec, what’s also really cool about the kuleshov effect to me is the fact that it has its origins in early soviet cinema, and thus can be seen as a way of trying to apply ideas of marxist dialectics to early film.

it’s the same basic format: thesis + antithesis = synthesis, where the two parts come together to create a greater meaning than they hold on their own. each shot by its lonesome doesn’t (necessarily) mean much, but it’s the collection of them together, the transition and cut between one piece and the next that creates the visual narrative and, in particular, the subtext of a film. and notably, while kuleshov gets his name slapped onto the effect since he outlined a lot of the specific levels of abstraction and demonstrated them distinctly in the cinema studies classic of battleship potemkin, in reality the process of figuring out this new cinematic language was just as much a collective process.

but it’s this reading of subtext that actually makes me think a lot of traditional fandom “reading too into it” moments when it comes to finding the hidden Gay Shit in any show aren’t actually all that absurd. because again, it’s subtext. even if it isn’t explicitly stated, there is still intention on the part of editors to create an underlying, unspoken story through the relationship between images and each individual shot. fandom is not absurd for recognizing this, or being baited by it.

[short-wooloo]

"Calvin’s complaints feel less childish and more genuine every day"

The complaints in question:

Calvin believes having to eat lima beans is comparable to living under the oppression of the soviet union

The fact that you think that this is a brilliant point and not say, a bratty six year old whining that he doesn't get to have his way and not eat healthy is... very indicative of people's thought process, I'd say this is how leftists think but they'd never criticize the soviet union like that

[dontforgetukraine]

Ukrainian language and literature have been a target for Russia for many years. Today, they are the target for its missiles, drones, and bombs. In past centuries, they were the targets of imperialist persecutors who hunted down Ukrainian writers. —MFA of Ukraine

Russia targets printing houses like Faktor-Druk in Kharkiv, which only recently restored some of its printing capacity and began printing textbooks for the new school year.

The Ukrainian language is also suppressed in the occupied territories. You can be tortured and killed just for speaking it. Libraries are targeted and destroyed and there has been an immense loss in the number of Ukrainian books.

In Soviet times, the Ukrainian letter "ґ'" (sounds like the letter g in English) was banned by the Soviet government. Ukrainian spellings were changed to make it more similar to Russian. If Ukrainian words differed from their Russian counterparts, those words were banned and replaced with more phonetically similar words to Russian. Any separation of the Ukrainian language from Russian was seen as nationalistic.

Russian propagandists and useful idiots love to promote the narrative that Russian speakers are oppressed in Ukraine to justify their invasion, but Russia has a lengthy history of committing linguicide of Ukrainian that continues into the current war today.

[slashfuhrer]

the babygirl vibes r strong with this one (so I made them even stronger)

[acid13rain]

Hello hello! I've created a new fanfiction!

Walls of Gold is its title and it is centric on Prussia x Russian Empire at the time of their Russo-Prussian alliance.

Other nations make an appearance/mention in the fic as well, such as, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Duchy of Prussia, Austrian Empire, Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, German Empire, and Soviet

This fic does involve, child neglect, war, injury, angst, trauma/abuse mostly in the form of flashbacks or mentions, character death, bad father son relationships but also fluff and a slow burn (aqquaintances -> friends -> lovers).

click here for the fic <3

I did try to make this fanfiction as historically accurate as possible. There may be some innacuracies but I will do my research and only sacrifice accuracy for story flow/quality.

Walls of Gold has its own tag -> #Walls.Of.Gold

[dead-generations]

I've recently seen a lot of goofy shit on my dash. And between Sino-Soviet split denialism, defending Lyshenkoism, denying (intermittent and early) soviet zionism, asserting that the US didn't intervene in WWII until it was clear that Germany couldn't beat the USSR like the US wanted, and claiming that the only countries which fought the USSR in WWII were Germany and Francoist Spain (!?) I am beginning to get the impression that tumblr MLs and particularly the most vulgar russophiles have literally no knowledge of the history of the USSR.

like this isn't quibbling over gulags and the molotov-ribbentrop pact, this is like, basic timeline and public policy and recorded events stuff. This is shit that isn't even the position in the Soviet histories and rhetoric of the time!

[ikarus-angel]

tell reich to get out of my autism brain (he got jammed into my brain like shrapnel and lives here now as a nuance to my sanity) also hmm you kinda scare me (positive)

Boy do I have bad news for you...

I don't think he's leaving

He, too, is a nuance to my sanity 👍

(Surprising, I know!)

Don't be scared, I'm really nice and sweet and cool and totally sane 🥺

go on.. 🧀

take the cheese.. .

nothing bad could ever happen.....

🧀 🧀 🧀 🧀 🧀 🧀 🪤