Moscow... of the FUTURE

Good thing they never built this one. pulling down that statue of Lenin would have been a bugger.

Mind you, there's still one statue of the old monster still extant in Seattle, WA. Pity I can't afford the $250,000 asking price for it. I've always wanted to play with an anti-tank missile.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel laureate author who demonstrated that truth is to tyrants as penicillin is to syphilis, has passed on at the age of 89.

Rest well, sir.

The Forsaken

A review of a harrowing new book by Tim Tzouliadis that tells the story about how thousands of Depression-era Americans bought into the lies spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty about the glories of Stalinism, emigrated to the Soviet Union in search of Utopia, and ended up dying in the Gulags for their gullibility.

Proof that Champagne Communism is not just a charming Islington eccentricity.

Red Snow

Dark Roasted Blend has a look at great Soviet snow machines.

We are deep in Thunderbirds territory here.

Shuttlski

Buran: The "other" space shuttle.

Stalin's "Supermen"

According to the Scotsman, Stalin had a lot in common with Dr. Vornoff.

THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

I guess that's what they really meant by the New Soviet Man.

Come to think of it, given that Homo Sovieticus was essentially a mindless brute with all human thought and sympathy bred out of him, it probably isn't that much of a joke.

Road to Nowhere

The stupidity of tyranny: An abandoned railway in Siberia that goes from nowhere to nowhere; built for no other reason than a bizarre whim of Stalin's that no one dared question.

Sputnik at Fifty

Fifty years ago the Soviet Union ushered in the Space Age with the launch of Sputnik.

A pity it had to also be a certified brown-trouser moment for free men everywhere.

Gorbachev Bagged.

Former leader of the former Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev has landed a deal to endorse French luggage bags. What makes this footnote interesting is this anodyne assessment of Mr. Gorbachev's career by the BBC:

Mr Gorbachev's far-reaching reforms of the Soviet system accelerated the collapse of communism in the 1980s.

Far reaching reforms indeed. It's pity that the Beeb feels it unnecessary to point out that the collapse of Communism and the disintegration of the USSR are exactly the opposite of what Mr. Gorbachev intended when he launched Glasnost.

A tiny detail, but a telling one.

Video Games For The Glory Of The Worker's Paradise

Why we won the Cold War.