Stilyagi and Airplanes

This post recieved an iconoclasts and conservatives award from the editorial board           Xenophobia is the fear of foreigners or outside culture. In post-war Russia, Xenophobia was very prevalent. The fear of outside influence was strong. It was so bad that there was a law passed restricting the marriage to a …

Love and Kerchiefs

 This post recieved a red star from the editorial board World War Two, also known as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union, was a war, even though defined by some of the most evil acts of mankind, was also a war fought out of love: love for one's country and love for one's …

The Happy-Go-Lucky Era

  Listen to this first! The March of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys was a song that became a colossal hit in 1930s Russia. Its popularity tied to Grigory Aleksandrov's musical film of a similar name, "Happy Go-Lucky-Guys", it was a collaboration between a major Stalin-era lyricist, Vasily Lebedev-Kumach and Isaac Dunaevsky, who was seen as the …

Peasant Utopia? Lies!

The short story ,"The Travels of My Brother Aleksei to the Land of Peasant Utopia" written by Aleksandr Chaianov is about a man named Aleksei Kremnev who works for the Soviet government in the early 1920s and he's taken into the future to 1984 to see the peasant utopia that the Russian's dreamed of. The …

The Artists that Started a Revolution

"Barge Haulers on the Volga" is a Russian-realist painting by artist Ilya Repin. Repin was a part of the Peredvizhiniki or the Wanderers, which was a group of art students who dropped out of the Russian Academy of the Arts to paint without having to follow the strict rules of the academy. Painted inbetween 1870 …