I wrote before about my service in the military installation responsible for the road construction and clearing, bridge building and other engineering support tasks. Unfortunately, I’ve never got to see a pontoon bridge being built in real life; not that we didn’t try, but my comrades where so untrained and slow that no one wanted to wait for us to complete our bridge, especially that a real bridge was nearby. I am sure our commander didn’t look good at the post-exercise briefing with his superiors, and knowing that he was cursing up a storm on the radio, but what do you expect from a bunch of virtually unpaid soldiers who didn’t want to be there in the first place especially waist-deep in the cold water on the first day of April.
Apparently there were troops in the Soviet Army who knew how to build a PMP Floating Bridge and here are a few videos to prove it. Those are quite fun to watch, notice that they start floating the equipment in under 7 minutes (it took us an hour just to drop all the links).
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpD7esUuwDU
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-hCTO00mPI
And now we dance: Russian Army Choir Presents “Not Gonna Get Us” by T.A.T.U.
Public outrage is easy to come by these days. Whether it is signing a petition to remove a statue from the public view, complaining about a store ad being too gay or just clicking on a Facebook page to support or condemn some cause, expressing your views doesn’t even require a trip to a mailbox anymore. And while some comments on these sites and petitions look angry and radical, these people should stand back in awe of the original masters of public character assassination and manufactured outrage – the Soviet Press.
The following page was published in the Soviet Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Newspaper) on November 1st 1958. In this issue various writers, artists, organizations, and even regular Soviet citizens expressed their outrage with the actions of Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his anti-Soviet novel. Famous Russian joke “I haven’t read Pasternak, but I condemn him” was extracted from one of the letters on this page.
Sometime ago I was arguing on twitter about the number of women in the medical profession in the USSR. While I knew I was right (because I am always right), my opponent ridiculed my anecdotal references, like a number of female doctors I visited in my childhood, or a number of female students in my Dad’s medical school photo-album. I thought maybe a scientific-looking study would be more convincing.
Women had been 10% of doctors and dentists in 1913. They rose to 77% in 1950 (Tsentral’noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie, 1969a: 103), but then declined to 72% in 1969, when they were also down to 55% among medical students, pointing to an equalized sex ratio in medicine a generation hence.
Although remuneration in the Soviet professions shows nothing remotely like the spread in the United States between the teacher at the bottom of the heap, the engineer somewhat better off, and the doctor way out in front, there is a differential there as well. The Soviet government, always economically pinched, has raised wages and salaries in a[264] manner to attract people into fields which would not otherwise be entered by enough candidates to meet the need. Engineering is the best enumerated. Law is the lowest paid of the professions in the Soviet Union, and in it women are precisely the same proportion (one-third) as in engineering,the highest paid. Women had been 5% of the lawyers in 1926. At present there are 2,500 women judges. So women are majorities in the two professions in the middle of the payscale – medicine and teaching minorities in the two at the extremes-engineering and law. However, the 1971-1975 Five-Year Plan provides sharp salary increases for the two professions of medicine and teaching. Those seeking signs of discrimination no matter what are faced with the fact that, in numbers as distinct from percentages, there are more women engineers than physicians, and more physicians than librarians. The 775,000 women engineers in the USSR (1969) is almost equal to the total number of engineers in the United States (870,000), of whom only 1% are women.
On this International Women’s Day I am posting some photos of the Soviet women at work and at play. Wishing the best to all my female readers, even those who thought they can prove me wrong.
