#sovietposter

[synthwave1950]

🌷 International Women's Day, March 8

International Women's Day, March 8 sale is here! -20% discount. Link — Etsy

[yaoist]

this is true actually stalin was really nice to roosevelt, which is notable because stalin was generally a huge cunt. roosevelt really liked him despite his head diplomat repeatedly advising him against it and even helped cover up katyn. stalin got roosevelt a fancy georgian vacation. ship rating: 7/10

[alliluyevas]

What do you think is the funniest fact about Joseph Stalin or Joseph Smith (or just mormon leaders in general)? And do you have a favourite photo of Nadezhda Alliluyeva?

Going to start off with Stalin and Nadya and then do Mormon leaders in a reblog! Sergo Beria's memoir is an absolute treasure trove of stories about Stalin acting absolutely bizarre, as is Nikita Khrushchev's. (You have to take a lot of Sergo's editorialization about his father with a hefty grain of salt, but I do think a lot of what he says about Stalin is likely quite accurate.)

Anyway, Sergo has a great story about Stalin going into his house when he was a kid, asking his (Sergo's) mom to make him a snack, and then wandering around in the house and acting pissy that they didn't have a photo of him on display and then Sergo's mom had to like. show him a bunch of art that then-elementary-school-aged Sergo had drawn of him (Stalin) to placate him. Which is kind of horrifying but I do honestly crack up when I think about this because quite frankly it is the behavior of a barnyard animal.

There's also a vignette from Khrushchev's memoirs about him and Mikoyan walking somewhere with Stalin and Stalin suddenly said "I think I might actually be a bad person" or some such comment and him and Mikoyan were just completely silent because they could not figure out how to respond to that and then eventually Stalin just went back to talking about whatever he was talking about. Again dark humor but I absolutely HOWL picturing what their faces must have looked like.

I guess these are more stories than facts, but hopefully that works.

These are my favorite photos of Nadya! In part because of the stories behind them. There actually aren't really a ton of photos of her sadly. the photo on the left is really rare, I've never seen it published online. I saw it for the first time when I went to the Alliluyev apartment museum in St. Petersburg which is where Nadya and her family were living in 1917 when the October Revolution happened and is preserved as a small "house" (or in this case apartment) museum with original furniture. They also have a photo album you can look at which has a ton of not-widely-available family photos and when I opened it up and saw this one I was honestly so moved by it I teared up. I like that she's looking right at the viewer and I think her expression looks very sweet. Of the available photos of her, I think in a lot of them she looks pretty stiff or formal and I think this one comes off as a little bit more relaxed.

The photo on the right has a really interesting backstory and I used it for the opening hook to my undergraduate biographical thesis. She's posing as Tatiana from Eugene Onegin, and there was a matching photo where Nadya's sister Anna was playing the role of Tatiana's sister Olga (side note: I think it's very interesting that the Alliluyev girls "cast" Nadya as Tatiana, because in the poem Tatiana is the older sister and irl Anna was older than Nadya. I do think that personality-wise they got the better fit, though.) It was also really powerful for me to see this photo because it was taken in the aforementioned Alliluyev apartment and they still have that piano.

[misanthropiccatboy]

reading about the collectivization of farms (+ associated mishandling of food) in the soviet union has made me much more sympathetic to fears of absolute government overreach when it comes to private sector industry; the idea the government could come in, completely overhaul, and then fuck up the very basic machinery of what makes your society function is very scary!

[jouissanceangel]

“When there is a home on every star,

when there is nowhere where we are lonely —

still, Earth will be our home,

nothing can change that;

because the land of the Soviets is here,

because this is where Lenin was born.”

- Arn Vergelis, from “Af der levone” (“On the Moon”) in Kosmishe Poeme, a cycle of space-themed poetry appearing in the March-April 1962 issue of Sovetish Heymland.

[andmaybegayer]

if you're reblogging armoured train and leather uniform pics, can *you* be pursuaded to watch David Lean's Dr Zhivago?

man I last watched Dr. Zhivago like. 20 years ago with my brother. It was on a double sided disc and we played the wrong side first. I do not remember what it's about so I should probably watch it.

[yaoist]

Even Molotov admitted that Stalin was getting unhinged in the 50s in his interviews (and that he got arrogant after the war lmao) but they eventually teamed up with Malenkov to try and kick Khrushchev out over his anti-Stalin measures. this could've been because Molotov and Kaganovich were arguably the most implicated in Stalin's crimes (and possibly Malenkov too), as the people consistently closest to him, but I think they were genuinely loyal (arguably Malenkov was just jumping ship as usual). everyone was implicated in the purges (the only crimes where there was any semblance of reckoning) but Kaganovich and Molotov were the ones to defend them. I don't think they would've taken the steps that Khrushchev did or that Beria would have (and kind of did, iirc, in removing Stalin's name from the papers and announcing the rehabilitation of the doctors) because Khrushchev and Beria hated Stalin.

Stalinists will call themselves materialists and then say shit like "revisionism taking over the party is why the USSR collapsed"

[triviallytrue]

Can we get *more* posts about the history of the USSR?

the next sovietpost is already at 847 words and i am *maybe* a third of the way done

[ghostofatree]

The Book of Lamentations continues with some examples that tie it to the previous and current book of printmaking process - the first plate is the Our Lady of Montevergine print that I was working on at the time. It was for the Etsy shop I was opening and is now up and running (link in bio) - the first sale I made was before I even listed it and was to an Eastern Orthodox priest working with the LGBT community. His print was a one off because he wanted his with touches of gold leaf. (The tradition with some gold leaf is that a layer of warm red clay is often applied as a base). Here I mapped that out with red spray paint that suddenly looked more soviet than I expected and the red version became my accidental favourite one of the image. I sold three of this image the week after the amazing Kitt Cherry (of Jesus in Love and QSpirit) published her recent article about this medieval legend - (usually straight-washed out of church history) of the Virgin rescuing a gay couple attacked and tied to a tree and left to die in snow. The next two are the rotatated crow images also toward the Etsy shop and the last one is simply Grizzly Geoff - for whom there is no explanation other than he was a gift from our lovely friends in Edinburgh and his gift tag ended up taking rebirth in my book. He is a fine figure of a man with his cropped hair, neat beard and patterned underpants despite his lack of hands or feet. #sketchbook #sketchbookdrawing #sketchbookdaily #linocut #linoprint #printmakersofinstagram #etsy #etsyshop #queerartist #queerart #ourladyofmontevergine #sovietposter #crows #corvidsofinstagram #patterndesign #grizzlygeoff (at Minster Court) https://www.instagram.com/p/CciHYYFMin_/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[yaoist]

yeah, it's kind of a shame it didn't lean into the bureaucratic nonsense because bureaucratic nonsense is one of the two funniest things about stalinism (the other being stalin - also not there!). the comic book it was based on had a pretty straightforward dramatic narrative and the movie was an adaptation; i think it would have been better if ianucci had just been sicced on the actual time period instead of an adaptation of an adaptation (and I think mid-late 30s would've been better, sorry beria).

the thick of it is an interesting show ideologically because it is clearly written from a liberal worldview but also a very bleak and cynical one that views not just liberalism, but, like, government itself as a failed project--it really struck me that the death of stalin is for all intents and purposes just another episode of the thick of it with the names changed and slightly higher stakes

[yaoist]

When Khrushchev once pleaded that he had a kidney ailment and should be exempt from drinking, Beria spoke up and said that he too had a kidney ailment, but that he drank nonetheless and it did him no harm. This of course left Khrushchev without an excuse.

wow they did not like each other did they

[alliluyevas]

On the subject of Mormon republican leanings and also my old friend Nikita Khrushchev. Let's take a break for a rare moment of combined Mormonposting and Sovietposting.

Here's Nikita Khrushchev petting a cow during his iconic 1959 visit to the United States. The balding gentleman with the dark suit and glasses standing next to him is LDS Apostle Ezra Taft Benson, who was also serving as Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture at the time. ETB was what I will academically refer to as an ardent anti-communist and what I might more pejoratively term a right-wing weirdo. He considered running for president as a John-Birch-society-sponsored third-party candidate with Strom Thurmond as VP in advance of the 1968 election, and then after that fell apart George Wallace asked him to be his VP candidate but LDS prophet David McKay basically forced ETB to say no, to give some idea of his political persuasion.

ETB was not keen on Khrushchev and felt that it was a mistake to invite him to the US at all, but his son Reed apparently took advantage of a car ride with a captive-audience Khrushchev to proselytize to him for forty-five minutes (though apparently Khrushchev argued back!) and later sent him and his family six copies of the Book of Mormon.

[misanthropiccatboy]

jury is still out on the holodomor for me. fitzpatrick puts it up to stalin's desire to press his subordinates for results and stubbornness in his beliefs, i'm not willing to take just the word of one person on the whole incident re: intentional genocide or incredible bureaucratic foolishness. maybe the chapter about it in blood and soil will go into more detail.

[jouissanceangel]

i need to be at the goth komsomol meeting so fucking bad

[bygonely]

50+ Lofty Soviet Space Posters Made During The Space Race To Motivate People

[ink-the-artist]

happy pride month

(they’re from the soviet cartoon “Light Blue Puppy,” “light blue” in Russian is also a slang word for gay)