Putin’s Pecker: ‘Officials denied its presence. Its mention had been purged from the internet.’ ‘So potent and coveted was this rare subterranean Ascomycete fungus – an irresistible blond truffle that brought on delusions of invincibility – that Russia’s born-again nationalists has named it Pipiska Putina. Putin’s Pecker.’ (phallus shaped)
Tsar alexander II declared that scientific fact had never limited Russian certainties or faith. ‘All countries abide by law but Russia abides by sayings and proverbs’.
Gogol quote: ‘that marvellous slumber which is known only to those fortunate beings who are bothered neither by haemorrhoids, nor fleas, nor overdeveloped mental faculties’
Red Westerns (USSR film genre) – ‘substituting the Urals for the Nevada’, ‘cowboy-like Red Army soldiers’ and ‘Apaches are portrayed as Civil War anti-communists’.
‘Nothing in this country can be understood without context’
‘In some quarters the victims of Stalin’s many purges are known as ‘Stalin’s Chips’
‘In Soviet times tattoos were found only on soldiers and criminals.’ Anti-communists would brand themselves with Nazi iconography or bloody Soviet medals. ‘Stars on the shoulders and knees meant ‘I kneel to no man’ ‘. ‘Onion-domed churches acted as a talisman, the number of cupolas indicating the number of crimes or conditions.’ ‘Some camp inmates even had Stalin or Lenin cut in to their chests, in the belief that no firing squad would shoot the venerated portraits.’ ‘Female convicts tended to be marked with magic numbers, ‘the thieves cross’ or an erect penis and knife with the words ‘Betray me and I’ll cut off your balls’. A bracelet signified a 5 year sentence. manacles indicated a decade in a gulag. Bleeding dots boasted of survival ‘between four walls’ in solitary confinement.’
‘Every time Russia faces a crisis people want wolf tattoos, because life is hard and they feel under attack. Tell them to come back when times are better’ – Pavel Angel (Russia’s most celebrated tattoo artist)
‘Fyodor Tyutchev, the nineteenth century poet, had warned that it was not possible to make sense of Russia, that the country was not amenable to reason, that to survive it one simply had to believe’
Not far from the ‘Big House’ there are two sphinxes created by the artist Mikhail Shemyakin. Half the sphinx is beautiful and feminine, the other half is a hollowed-eye skull. They were made to represent the victims of political repression and sit directly on top of the drains of the ex-KGB basement which once spewed blood into the River Neva.
A project known as ‘Last Address’ aims to commemorate the individuals hurried off to the gulags and KGB basements never to return. Since the project started the authorities have done all they can to cripple it and have even declared the group behind it as ‘foreign agents’. The creator of the project, was inspired by the ‘stumble stones’ of 500 towns in Germany inscribed with the names of individuals who fell victim to the Nazis. there are 75,000 stumble stones in Western Europe and so far 750 ‘Last Address’ plaques placed by volunteers. You can find them on Pushkinskaya Ulitsa 19 (3), Fontanka Embankment 129 (5), The Fountain House (2) and a few on Bolshaya Pushkarskaya. The names remember people taken away forever for as little as receiving a postcard from a relative in a foreign country branding them as spies!
The ‘Mother of the gulag’ in Solovetsky is no longer a museum and memorial, instead ‘old camp guards get together there to celebrate the founding of the gulag system’.
‘In soviet times the KGB’s headquarters had been called the ‘tallest building in Moscow’, because Siberia could be seen from its basement.’
‘Solovki is Russia’s Stonehenge, Lourdes and Auschwitz.’ The prison/monastery’s prisoners built 20-foot thick walls.
‘Solovki became the first cancer cell of the tumour that would spread across Russia’ – Solzhenitsyn
Solovki abuses – ‘Priests were stripped naked, dunked in water and then staked in the winter courtyards until they became living ice statues’.
In the 1930s a Nazi delegation came to Solovki to glean insights in to the system.
‘In 1989 over two million people joined hands to create a 420-mile human chain across all three Baltic States.’ – Anti-Soviet protest
300 villages in Russia’s enclave of Kaliningrad remain abandoned to this day.
‘All Kaliningrad’s public toilets are illuminated with blue light that makes veins undetectable and so prevents local users from injecting themselves’
‘…displays went ahead as planned. Kiev’s May Day Parade – with ranks of children waving paper flowers and military bands playing patriotic marches – took place as radioactive soot showered on the capital’ – Chernobyl Fallout
‘A man named Andras Orosz had lived in the village of Novoye Selo, called Tiszaujhely in Hungarian. Over the course of his long life he had held five different nationalities: Austro-Hungarian, Romanian, Czechoslovak, Soviet and, finally, Ukranian. Yet Orosz had never once left his village; the borders had been moved around him.’
‘Within a year the entire Wall – bar a few token stretches – truly vanished, leaving in its place only a discreet line of paving stones.’
