Привет!

Welcome to all things related to Russia in any form! The language, the country, the people, the music, the culture, the history, the art, etc.

[expressions-of-nature]

Kola Pennisula, Russia by Mikhail Konarev

[komsomolka]

Embroidered Map of Russia (Chuvash National Museum).

The map fragments were hand-embroidered by artisans from each region and combined into a single piece. The map depicts traditional patterns from various ethnic groups living in what is now Russia.

[qrgirl-deactivated20220303]

the space race may be the funniest point in history period and i'll stand by that. the US is like "yes whoever gets into space first will prove once and for all that our economic model is superior and that we are, in general, the superior country of superior and smarter people." then the soviets just went and did it and the US freaked out and needed to cover their ass so were like "WE MEAN THE MOON, WE MEAN THE FIRST TO LAND ON THE MOON."

[fanderburker]

[skluug]

yeah its cus walking on the moon was cool as hell and all this other boring shit sucked ass

[togglesbloggle]

When I was a freshman in a red-state college, I had a professor who taught Newtonian physics with a super thick Russian accent.  The student body was unusually conservative for a state college, so there was a sort of general bemusement about learning physics from a Russian, but even back then the Cold War was far enough in the past that not even the red tribe was inclined to stir up trouble about it.

He was aware enough of this to get off on trolling the class, though.  Whenever some force diagram in a homework assignment needed to be weightless, instead of being some generic spacecraft it would be “Mir” specifically.  And he’d always use ‘cosmonaut’ instead of ‘astronaut’, that kind of thing.

One day about halfway through the semester, he’s doing this with in-class examples on the board, and one of the students finally gets up the guts to troll back a little.  So this kid shouts from the back of the auditorium, “Hey professor, what’s the difference between a cosmonaut and an astronaut?”

And this beautiful man spins around on one heel to face the class, whiteboard marker triumphantly over his head, clearly having been waiting for this moment the entire semester: “Cosmonaut go to space first! Ha!”

[snailspng]

Fortune telling cards (1995) by A. Maluegin PNGs

(source)

[clem8tis]

igor shcherbakov, litha (2021)

[gaytanic-panic]

"Russian transsexuals received support and publicity from some sections of the nation’s gay rights movement. In 1992, the Moscow Union of Lesbian and Gay Men submitted the identity documents of transsexuals to the Ministry of Justice for consideration of changing their names and legal gender markers. In the same year, the queer journal 1/10 published two articles detailing the stories of two transfeminine individuals.

One issue featured a cover proclaiming 'We have lesbians in the USSR and transes too!' Inside, twenty-three-year-old bookkeeper Margarita Mankevich told her story. Rita identified as a true transsexual, stating 'I’ve been a woman for as long as I can remember.' She realized how abnormal this was at sixteen years old and faced such tremendous bullying that she attempted suicide. She listed Communists and the church as the two groups most hateful toward her. To earn enough hard currency to pay for a sex reassignment surgery, she moved to Moscow and began working as a prostitute for foreign clients despite finding sex 'in a man’s body' humiliating. People around Rita falsely assumed that she was a homosexual man. She quickly earned enough money to buy a fake passport with the correct name and gender listed and began modeling and acting for pornographic productions in Austria and Finland. Surgery, however, was much more expensive than a passport, especially because she intended to undergo surgery in Western Europe since she knew half a dozen individuals who received sexual reassignment in Moscow, and none were satisfied with the results. She concluded by listing her mailing address for other transsexuals who might want information on their own condition to contact her and tells those reading to not feel ashamed for being transsexual.

An article by Tomas Radek in a separate issue told another side of the trans story. Radek began by explaining that trans is an umbrella term that can be applied to both transsexuals and transvestites. Radek’s friend Nikolas started wearing women’s underwear as a child and eventually began to dress in women’s clothing. Nikolas lived a complicated life; he kept his hair short despite his clothing, used male pronouns but referred to his sex life as lesbian,and explained that when he had sex with women, he 'played the role of a woman.' He sought the advice of a sexologist on his condition, who reacted with confusion, but told him that he could continue living this way. Nikolas had a wife and was not seeking to change his legal identity, so he appeared as a normal, heterosexual male, despite how he might happen to have sex or dress himself. Nikolas remained feeling isolated, and the article concluded with his mailing address and a plea for readers who are like him to write to him."

This is a section from my dissertation, Russian Blue: The Production of Queer Identity in 1990s Russia, where I used a lot of gay periodicals from 90s Russia as my source base

[gaytanic-panic]

"The author wrote from a urological center about the buoyant mood among those waiting for gender confirming surgery. He responded to people wished to dismiss transsexualism as insanity or a foreign import, stating 'we are not living on the moon or in America.' He insisted that, just like ordinary Russians, transsexuals had little money, and struggled to survive in 1990s Russia. These men came to Moscow for treatment as a form of pilgrimage, often making the trip from Siberia without money or proper identification documents. Many resorted to sex work while in Moscow to support themselves. He described one patient, Oleg, as 'smiling like Gagarin before his launch' as he was wheeled to the operating room for his phalloplasty. Some of these men would get surgery and take hormones but would never be legally able to change their gender markers, because the process was too difficult. Others went through this process without telling their parents, as they lived with their parents and would otherwise be homeless. As strange as the recovery process and the medical instruments seemed, the author stated that this was all part of the 'normal struggle for life,' and that the alternative was self-destruction. The article ended with the men discussing their plans after their operations. 'When I am done with the operation I will settle into a normal career

I am going to go to school

I am going to marry my Larissa

I am going to buy my daughter a bike

I am going to go home, to Kazakhstan

And I am going to Murmansk, my fiancé is waiting for me there'

The author remarked that this must have been how their grandfathers sounded at the end of the Second World War. This article locates sexual reassignment within a Russian cultural geography, specifically of achievement–Gagarin’s first spaceflight and the victory over Hitler. As he said, Russian transsexuals did not live on the moon or in America, they lived in Russia."

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[sovietpostcards]

USSR-made portable radio receivers from 1960s and 1980s (via thngs)

[sovietpostcards]

Yuri Gagarin, the hobbyist photographer, at home with his wife.

[ghostedmarshmallow]

Yuri Gagarin being identified only as an amateur photographer and not literally the first human in space has me on the floor

[o-craven-canto]

[o-craven-canto]

This is a good reminder that there is a lot of texture and complexity to people; every human contains lots of aspects that would be completely unrelated if not for the fact that the same person experiences them. It’s easy to forget this, and compress the people you meet into a caricature; even celebrities usually end up being famous for one thing alone. But even something as glorious as the first space travel by a living human does not fully encompass a life.

This, too, is Yuri.

[my-russia]

Traditional Russian houses in Kimry, Tver Oblast

[disease]

"AMONG THE WAVES" IVAN AIVAZOVSKY // 1898 [oil on canvas | 97 x 66 cm.]

[huariqueje]

At the Window - Ilya Pyankov

Russian , b. 1972 -

Oil on canvas , 110 x 65 cm.

[sovietpostcards]

"Congratulations on the work wins, dear women!"

Poster by Ruben Suryaninov (USSR, 1973).

[random-brushstrokes]

Boris Zadvytsky - Lights (1964)

[strawberrypopstation]

ёжик в тумане 1975 dir. yuri norstein

[ferylcheryl]

STUNNING, dream-like short animated film from the 1970s.

Here it is on YouTube:

[degeneratedworker]

"So that People don't Die from a Brutal War, Protect the World like the Apple of your Eye" Liliya Yakovlevna Levshunova Soviet Union 1986

[573p5]

Moscow, Russia - December 2023