Giving the Life Magazine a break, we continue onto the May 1914 issue of the Rotarian Magazine which was largely dedicated to Kansas City. Filled with photos and articles where mustachioed men took turns extolling the virtues of Kansas City, its businesses, theaters, schools, real estate and architecture. If you are bored at work a fan of Kansas City history, you should be reading this magazine already. 1914 was the year when the Kansas City Union Station was opened and the magazine dedicates the cover and several pages of photographs and essays to the “largest Union Station in the world”.
This rule book was issued in 1987 for the Soviet Military Contingent in Afghanistan. The Soviets still had two bloody years left before the last troops made it home. Not getting drafted to serve in Afghanistan was probably the only benefit of being Jewish that ever materialized in all off my life in the USSR. Thousands of others weren’t so lucky and over 15,000 didn’t come home.
There are two kinds of people in the world – selfless dreamers and the rest of us. Selfless dreamers are busy dreaming up ways to make the world better, feed the starving, enrich the poor and keep the Earth at some temperature that they know to be perfect for all of us to live happily and comfortably. The rest of us are lazily pointing out why these dreams will never come true and why they shouldn’t, at the same time hoping that there is enough medication to keep selfless dreamers sedated or at least writing another unsellable book. Sometimes the dreamers manage to convince the weakest-minded among the rest of us to follow them and that’s when we end up participating in wild social experiments like the one in the USSR that lasted for over 70 years.
I am sure in 1917 the idea of communal living sounded great: rich people where enjoying palaces and nice apartments with heat and indoor plumbing, while the poor where huddling in shanties, dorms and dirty cramped tenements with no running water and freezing outhouses. People reasoned that they could use an upgrade, kick out or downsize the rich oppressors, move into their posh apartments and share the amenities with their working class brethren. Thus was born a “kommunalka” or a communal apartment where many families were crammed together in a formerly single-family apartment. I am not sure how many days it took the new kommunalka dwellers to realize their mistake, find the dreamers who promised to make their lives better and beat them senseless, but they and their families had over 70 years to regret that move and some are still facing their neighbors every morning in the line to use the restroom.
I guess it takes a generation to grow up without knowing any better to have a completely opposite reaction to something that would normally be considered abnormal. I’ve seen all kinds of living arrangements but I never thought that any of them were weird, no matter how ugly, overpopulated or cramped some of these places looked I always thought that was business as usual. I wrote about communal living before and originally planned to expand on the subject but I found a virtual museum with plans, photos and videos, with English captions and transcripts which thoroughly covers every aspect of life in a kommunalka. You wouldn’t find any of this in the glossy cheery photo albums that somehow made it into this country.
However, for your enjoyment I uploaded and tagged a video clip from the movie Russian Dolls in which the characters arrive at the typical apartment in St.Petersburg.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HcNmpEiNdU
Another clip is from a recent Russian movie Stilyagi which also depicts a huge communal apartment, although it may be a dorm. I think in real life the happiness was dialed down a little (or a lot). Also notice neighbors always being in your business and a lot of times in your food (imagine your office fridge times 10).
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyGOf0jdOoQ
Thin walls, whole families in the same room with kids and grandparents, often separated only by curtains, fights, hate, backstabbing, stealing, it wasn’t a communal dream that the dreamers promised. But at the same time there was love, care, lifelong friendships, memorable times and helping hands – some things cannot be killed by years of inhuman living conditions.
Ivan Rebroff who was neither “Ivan” nor “Rebroff”, became world-famous for singing Russian Folk Songs. My Father always cherished an old “contraband” record of Rebroff’s incredible voice.
On this day 22 years ago Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded and became the world’s worst nuclear disaster. I don’t have much of a Chernobyl personal story. It happened right before the May Day when we were looking forward to a weekend of camping and drinking. Soviet Government did not even acknowledge the disaster and obviously didn’t know how to deal with it, so all the information was coming in the form of rumors and Voice of America shortwave broadcasts. Some unconfirmed whispers about a fire on a nuclear power plant did not stop us from spending few careless days in tents around the campfire. It was literally the wind direction that decided who will be affected by the fallout. My friends and me were among the lucky ones, wind blew in the opposite direction. There are few people in Kansas City who were drafted to work on the site clean-up and decontamination. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who were affected in various degrees. Nowadays, there are plenty of pictures of the ghost town which is still stuck in 1986 and tours of the disaster area are freely available. The eerie images from the 30 km zone would make a suitable background for the final scene of the Planet of the Apes. Just like the destroyed Statue of Liberty in the movie it stands as a reminder of a good intentions gone bad, government inefficiency and lack of caring for the people, and heroism of the simple people in the face of unknown and deadly force.
More information is available here.
Chernobyl,
Reactor is still going,
Still taking lives.
On this day 22 years ago Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded and became the world’s worst nuclear disaster. I don’t have much of a Chernobyl personal story. It happened right before the May Day when we were looking forward to a weekend of camping and drinking. Soviet Government did not even acknowledge the disaster and obviously didn’t know how to deal with it, so all the information was coming in the form of rumors and Voice of America shortwave broadcasts. Some unconfirmed whispers about a fire on a nuclear power plant did not stop us from spending few careless days in tents around the campfire. It was literally the wind direction that decided who will be affected by the fallout. My friends and me were among the lucky ones, wind blew in the opposite direction. There are few people in Kansas City who were drafted to work on the site clean-up and decontamination. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who were affected in various degrees. Nowadays, there are plenty of pictures of the ghost town which is still stuck in 1986 and tours of the disaster area are freely available. The eerie images from the 30 km zone would make a suitable background for the final scene of the Planet of the Apes. Just like the destroyed Statue of Liberty in the movie it stands as a reminder of a good intentions gone bad, government inefficiency and lack of caring for the people, and heroism of the simple people in the face of unknown and deadly force.