How Vladimir Lenin Became a Mushroom (2017)
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Central TV back then was the #2 authority, right after "Pravda". Anything shown or discussed on TV was "official", there was no room for bullshit on Soviet TV. And then, suddenly, comes this program, where Kuryokhin proves Lenin was a mushroom. Lenin's figure was so much mythologized (there were even few research institutes dedicated to Leninism) that nothing seemed impossible. A guy which looked like a scientist equipped with complex diagrams and talking about mushroomness of Lenin on central TV - at some point the "documentary" crossed certain level of craziness that it became believable.
No other modern art performance, before or since, left such a deep mark on my brain.
Yes, you are nailing it down there. Before Goebbels, there was Pravda
Here is one example[1]:
"One example, which all Russian people know by heart – Volodya Lenin was playing in the house and accidentally broke crystal graphene (crystal bottle for water or drinks). He was afraid that he would get punished, so he lied that he had nothing to do with this accident. But deep inside he was a good boy, so he felt bad about it. And several days later he told his relatives that it was him who broke the thing."
"Lenin was a Mushroom" was just taking this to an extreme and that's why people in early 90s USSR found it funny.
[1] https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e...
In America, when children grow up, parents could have that talk with them about how George Washington really was a great guy and how much they appreciate if their children wouldn't cut down the cherry tree in the garden but also about how this story about George Washington is just that - a story.
I wasn't there at the time, so this is just my take on it: I imagine in the USSR it could have been dangerous to talk to children like that and one way out was to exaggerate the stories until the child notices what's going on. Now daddy Sergei Kurekhin was doing that to the whole Soviet Union - and that's why they laughed about it.
[1] I call it a joke and not a hoax, because I think hoax kind of misses the point. I wasn't there at the time but this is my opinion: I don't think anyone believed it, I think people didn't say so partly because they didn't want to destroy the joke and partly because this was still the USSR.
First, you need to make sure your children understand the magnitude of danger from repeating what they heard at home. That requires some maturity and intelligence, but more importantly the idea that "there are important truths that you can get punished for saying in a wrong place" is itself one of those important truths that you can get punished for saying in a wrong place, so you either need to approach this very very carefully or take a risk and hope for the best.
Yes, some jokes were okay, especially the toothless ones. Like, making a joke about being poorer or having worse quality of products than the West was relatively safer than making a joke about party members killing each other or hurting random people.
It also depended on who could hear you, and what kind of a job your parents had. The better job, the greater risk of losing your job for saying wrong stuff.
Also, "speak quite freely at home" is more than just jokes. I am pretty sure most people would not feel safe discussing The Gulag Archipelago at home.
I am sure there were kitchen conversations even under Stalin, but to far less extent -- most conversationists ended up in some unpleasant places.
Will you tell us next that Holocaust is just some Zionist propaganda?
Also, it obviously matters what it is you're saying. Most people just told jokes about the communist regime and talked about how shitty life was. Nobody cared about that as long as they kept it private.
And why would they (the KGB) have cared (about jokes)? The venting of steam, instead of letting it build up and affect change, would have to be invented if people didn't do it voluntarily. That kind of self-deprecating humour is all over our media these days, too, we love to bring up important subjects to channel them into harmless stuff, just because we can't pretend it's not there, but also not allow ourselves to actually see it and be serious in its presence.
But some assume that the absence of free speech means that everyone is either brainwashed or so terrified they are afraid to speak their minds at home. I just had to point out this is not how it was in the late USSR.
The point is also that there is a not that small category of people who are ready to believe really everything for as long as they hear that from a smart looking guy in a suite, and it is "dumb and simple enough to believe." This the very thing going on now in Easter Europe with ultraright maxim "refugees steal your welfare" and "Soros conspiracy"
Now, this is being weaponized big time, against the US this time. It took Kremlin probably just few hundred man hours to make one of such guys to attempt assassination of Hillary Clinton.
Now imagine how things will turn if they will double down on that.
Coincidence? I think not.
The site is run by EEAS East Stratcom Task Force (EEAS is the European Union's diplomatic service).
Boy was I wrong. There are so many alternative realities out there now that soon it'll be hard to find two people living in the same one.
They were always there. Absolutely nothing has changed about how crazy people are. Now it's merely easier to commiserate or fight about it with more people.
We've certainly been lied to on major issues recently by our State machine in the UK too.
Lies are probably necessary at some times; but these don't seem to have been.
The linguistic anthropologist cited in the article is wrong about at least one thing.
As a kid I read a book which seriously made the case that Jesus was a magic mushroom - the English archaeologist and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John M Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970)
"Allegro's book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) argued...that stories of early Christianity originated in an Essene clandestine cult centred around the use of Psilocybin mushroom, and that the New Testament is the coded record of this shamanistic cult. ...that the authors of the Christian gospels did not understand the Essene thought..[that] the Christian tradition is based on a misunderstanding of the scrolls. ...that Jesus in the Gospels was in fact a code for a type of hallucinogen, the Amanita muscaria, and that Christianity was the product of an ancient 'sex-and-mushroom' cult."[0]
Well, I learnt since that Santa Claus is a mushroom myth[1], and the soma of the Vedas (the earliest Hindu texts) sure sounds like mushrooms..
edit: Added last paragraph and..Ok downvoter, care to explain? Maybe you have some good reason, but it just makes me dislike HN when people downvote for apparently no reason but..well, who knows.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Allegro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cr...
[1] I read about that in Scientific American 20ish years ago. Some interesting leads here: http://www.google.com/search?q=scientific%20american%20santa...
Not exactly a hoax, but more a wink and a nod at the bastardization of the media apparatus of a totalitarian state that is soon to be replaced, and thus no longer requires donning the pomp and circumstance of official government communications.
For Medvedev it's pretty simple: in his young years he sang on a party popular song "Woolly bumblebee" from a popular movie and told that to journalists. That was probably the most interesting part of interview and search engines got flooded with queries like "Medvedev bumblebee". So the phrase became viral and now everybody is aware of his true nature :)
For Putin it's even funnier: he told the journalists that during his presidency he works as a slave on a galley. In Russian words "slave" and "crab" are pretty close: "rab" and "crab". And the word "as" contains the first letter from "crab". So there was a typo in the newspaper stating that Putin works as crab on galley: "как раб на галере" > "как краб на галере".
[0] https://www.vox.com/2018/8/4/17651630/christopher-robin-bann...
But also, his bullshitting skills are unparalleled, you literally never know if he's saying something he believes. There are sort-of “behind the scenes” clips for the absurdist movie ‘Two Captains 2’—where he as an actor, and the director Sergey Debizhev talk to different reporters by making up each their own plot on the spot. There's a 40-minute TV interview where the interviewer admits he doesn't know if a single true thing was said. In the second clip from the OP article you can see how both Kuryokhin and Sholokhov had trouble holding in the laughter while recording their “talk,” and that's just a part of the full video.
The thing about late 80s–early 90s Russian media and arts scene is, it was “anything goes,” a period of braindump after the suffocating atmosphere of the USSR. (I barely caught the end of the time of change in the late 90s, and still the influx of modern arts was like enlightenment and nirvana after both stale Soviet standards and the sugary shitshow of the local pop music).
In this scene, a lot of talented people just did weirdest things they could with the extremely low budgets, because the old rules were thrown away, and no new ones were made yet. Sex, blood, shit, you name it, we had a lot of that, mostly in abominable taste and quality. There are plenty of bands of varying degree of absurdism from that era: Nogu Svelo, NOM, GrOb, Mango-Mango, the parody of Boney Nem, etc. Pranksters and jesters became important in all forms of media since they were showing people that life could, and probably should, be a lot different. Kuryokhin worked closely with the gang of the Leningrad “rock club,” but I'd say he was sorta ahead of them, being in free jazz and modern-classical music and known in the West (playing on one stage with Zorn in '91, come on).
A repetition of that experience is impossible unless we have another go with the Iron Curtain. In the past thirty years, media and show business here have settled a lot just like they did in the West, disregarding even the whole oppression stuff. Now there are things that you can do to get any kind of known, and making an absurdist band is not really one of them. (Though the post-indie antifolk wave from ~five years ago was pretty good.) For my taste, we're in dire need of fresh big time satire that cuts deep and hurts a lot.
Bonus track: “a true renaissance of shit” that is more familiar to the Western audience, courtesy of Poorly Drawn Lines: http://www.poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/internet/
GrOb started in early 80-s though.
The two quotes from him I remember to this day: "with enough time and money, I can make a city to vote even for a devil himself," and second "people believe in whatever is easiest to believe, the bydlo did once believe that the earth was flat after all"
That does not work if the other side has their own politech. But it does work if there is no other side at all.
As in cattle? Charming man.
Russians picked up this word recently and use it as synonym for "redneck", often used as label for Ukrainians.
In this case, it means more like "redneck".
The word bydlo was borrowed into Russian (from Ukrainian, which in turn got it from Polish) a very long time ago, and has been used in works of Russian literature (Aksyonov, Strugatsky brothers, Sholokhov, Kuprin) through the entire span of the 20th century, including before the revolution. According to the Russian National Corpus, the earliest usage in Russian print was in 1869.
The word and its usage has nothing to do with Ukraine, and is not used as a epithet for Ukrainians or any other particular ethnicity - unless talking about specific Ukrainians (or Russians, or Americans, or whoever else) who act like bydlo.
EDIT: I was wrong about the etymology. Updated.
For us, with more than thousand years of history, few decades ago is recent history.
It usually means a large congregation of people - often during some event - that make said event worse by their presence in such numbers.
No, they didn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth