Soviet Posters

it isn't really more terrible/shameful than the rest of Revolution and Civil War related. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War - The Red Army was trying to get to Germany to support the Revolution there. It was along the ideology of sparking worldwide Revolution. It is just happened that the path was through Poland who wasn't a part of Russia anymore - it was a young independent nation state which has finally just got it independence back after more than 200 years of it being lost, and who had their own big plans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermarium, and didn't want to be steamrolled by Russia again. Polish were very enthusiastic in that war and tore the Red Army/Bolsheviks a new one. Btw, Stalin was one of the main commanders of that invading force. In the history lessons in USSR schools those events were kind of muted and/or pretty much lost from the narrative together with many other events/facts which would be hard to fit into the supposedly glorious story of Revolution and Civil War victory by Bolsheviks.

I leave it here, in case the author shows up.

I'm getting a good ol' PHP/MySQL error (EDIT: with credentials in clear text, I removed them):

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Having known folks who lived in the USSR and modern Russia, I recognize the romantic elements are the effect of powerful propaganda. In reality, people were burdened by not being able to meet basic needs and were afraid of their government. Engineering was done under the barrel of a gun.

Romantic elements aside, I think we can all recognize the USSR was responsible for remarkable accomplishments, ranging from sublime to deeply horrifying.

(even getting TV shows from the UK, a western country, was hard, because they were on PAL. people used to "camera copy", running a VCR to a TV on one system, and videorecording that with a camera running the other system)

So anyway, lately I've been taking full advantage of web standards to see what I had only been guessing about during the Cold War.

(the kids shows are still useful; I've had enough greek that I already knew a good portion of cyrillic, but learned the rest from Khryusha, Stepashka, and Philya)

Full props to all the ex-Warsaw Pact countries who changed their basic political systems without much violence. молодец!

To me the Soviet Union represents this kind of philistinic failed experiment (Lenin was literate which therefore elevates him above Hitler?) come horror movie that is simultaneously terrifying and yet very fascinating.

One of the strangest things one finds in books about Soviet spies (double agents or not etc.) is that often the only photos of them in public taken with state blessing and thus surviving are those taken by the Soviet internal security services.

I find Soviet aircraft design quite interesting too, in the sense that even just in the cockpit designs you can see the work of designers making do with relatively limited budgets. In a flight simulator it becomes obvious that US planes are almost easy to use whereas Russian cockpits are one size fits all (i.e. training vs design costs)

- Desired process: Parlaying emotional suffering into last-ditch displays of heroic boldness

- Doing what needs to be done come hell or high water (or, come softness/weakness)

- Mowing down one's fragile sense of self in order to become a new and stronger person via some objective process like meeting a goal

- Winning at all costs (and there will be costs)

Interestingly, the Soviet march-style (just move forward) tech and economic focus has been noted as being a polar opposite to chaotic freedom. In the USA we are faced with a very strange dichotomy in this way; we are ever attempting to transcend historic barriers by uniting economic expedients and technology with a sense of freedom and ethics. This makes us the "weak" state, in various narratives.

In the Soviet Union model, the individual must die; individuals are not leveraged positively in the economic model. It's interesting if you look at the end of the Soviet Union and the tempting role of individualist culture.

IMO it's an interesting archetype, the Soviet Union, but in individuals it can be somewhat worrying insofar as it portrays or carries the subject's inner state for them. This is far from uniformly true across the board, but there are often evidences of striking face validity if you do a lot of work with individuals who are A) in tech and B) suffering. The Soviet Mindset carries a perception that they must forget themselves and go to work, winning at all costs. However if the boss pushes themself this way, for example, their employees may find themselves suffering unfairly under a covert contract with what amounts to the Soviet Union mindset, and this is not exactly the world's healthiest leadership culture.

(I designed a productivity system around these concerns and spent a lot of time reconciling symbol and implications for productivity)

There's also the reverse case, in which one is basically stuck due to subjective emotional complications, and they are effectively rescued by this Soviet mindset. If one needs to adopt an executive mindset, few executive mindsets are going to execute better than the Soviet ;-)

The technological progress made was impressive, although I thought it was made largely at the cost of the people and workers, rather than in co-operation with them. I am a socialist, (anarchist) and anti-Bolshevik. The October revolution was more of a right wing coup, which came after a true broad based revolution according to my interpretation of history. That said, despite the brutal methods employed to reinstate managerial control of the factories and so on, the country did progress from an impoverished, illiterate state in 1917 to an advanced manufacturing state.

The same can be said of China, which in 1948 was developmentally on the level of say India or Africa.

The biggest difference was their approach to public infrastructure. The metro stations in all three cities are absolutely gorgeous. The trains are old and creaky, but the stations look like palaces (which is exactly what they wanted to create - "palaces for the people").

Yandex just gave me https://yandex.com/search/?text=ссср%20Плакат%20купить&lr=10... 5 pages of hits...