“In 1929, the Russians produced their first talkie, the snappily titled The Five Year Plan for Great Works. The possibility of synchronized sound inspired a trio of pioneers, composer Arseny Avraamov, animator Mikhail Tsihanovsky and engineer Evgeny Sholpo who were fascinated by the curved loops, arcs and waveforms […]
In 1934, following the death of Lenin, one of the new rulers of the Soviet Union identified a “conspiracy” in the upper echelons of Soviet government and began a series of murderous purges that left hundreds of officials, labor leaders, intellectuals, artists, and most importantly his personal enemies […]
“The history of Soviet mission patches begins with one of space travel’s most significant achievements. In 1963, Valentina Teresknova made history as the first woman in space. Her call sign was Chayka—Seagull—and under it, she completed 48 orbits of Earth. As she did so, hidden from view, sewn onto the […]
Ajooba is one of those Bollywood movies that almost everybody dismisses—cheap costumes, awkward giant monsters, make-do special effects—until you get them to actually think about it. Released in 1991, this bank-breaking Indian and Soviet co-production features a plot that sounds more at home in the 1970s in the […]
Bturn has a gallery of images from a Soviet picture book in which naked people form the letters of the cyrillic alphabet. “The fascinating scans come from an alphabet picture book published around 1931, allegedly to fight widespread illiteracy across the vast Soviet territories. It was drawn by […]
Sometimes you find something just in time for it to die and the best you can offer is a good death. Once my roommate found a pigeon with a broken neck and brought it home. It spent a night in our bathtub before we took it to wildlife […]
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The Cultural Gutter 