Category: sovietica

• In Search of Babushka

  May 18

  Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps is an eloquent travel memoir that also manages to do the heavy lifting required by great historical writing. Though German-born and… more ›

• Moja droga (Part 1)

  Oct 6

  Maybe she had asked the question before; maybe she’d forgotten my rambling answer. I vaguely remember, perhaps, that we’d had this conversation sitting, no less, at a coffee shop in… more ›

• The Crimean Tense: When Past Is Present

  Mar 6

  Referencing the past is a weak form of analysis and one that offers little insight to the current situation in Ukraine. The Russian occupation of Crimea is distinctly not like… more ›

• Legend

  Feb 27

  I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know of Van Cliburn. From small-town east Texas, he became a legend–and one of my heroes–of both classical music… more ›

• Into the Past, Part I

  Jan 1

  I spent a few hours the other day cleaning out my study, throwing out, shredding, and recycling various papers I’ve collected over the past several years in anticipation of a… more ›

• Malevich and Suprematism, Part I

  May 14

  Kazimir Severinovich Malevich [Казимир Северинович Малевич] was Russian in its most contested forms: he was born in Ukraine of ethnic Poles, which would make his name Kazimierz Malewicz. I suspect… more ›

• Elektro-Szokotczka

  Nov 21

  Back in the Soviet Union children of the formerly bourgeois often held names from refashioned revolutionary slogans and technological innovations. The most comical example of just such a name is… more ›

• Found in Translation

  Mar 26

  Below is a snippet of a poem from Soviet dissident poet Igor Guberman that was mentioned on one of the Belarusian blogs I’ve been visiting over the past few days.… more ›

• Jun 27

  5:34, and I feel like I’m really too drunk to enjoy the possibility that I stayed up all night having conversations within conversations with Sean from Cali, Doug from NY… more ›