Archive for Soviet Union

Soviet architectures

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , on 24 November 2012 by delclem

 


“The Architekturzentrum Wien (AzW) takes a look in its current exhibition at the architecture of the non-Russian Soviet republics between the late 1950s and the end of the USSR. The stories about Soviet modernism related by researchers and eye witnesses are practically unknown. ‘We dispell once and for all the myth that the architecture in the former Soviet Union was completely different from the West,’ says AzW director Dietmar Steiner at the presentation of the new exhibition. The elaborate research and exhibition project takes a close look at the architecture of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.” >Text & photos (c) wieninternational.at 2012

Raoul Wallenberg 1912-47(?): savior & victim

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , on 4 August 2012 by delclem


“A Swedish diplomat saved the lives of many Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust, but his fate since he was abducted by the Soviets in 1945 is unknown.”

A call to remember & research on the occasion of his 100th birthday.
>full text (c) HAARETZ, 2012   >video on Wallenberg (c) YouTube, 2011

A statue of Raoul Wallenberg in Tel Aviv: photo by Tomer Appelbaum
Upper photo: Wallenberg portrait in the Austrian Embassy, Budapest (c) EPA

The Khatyn Massacre in Belorussia Revisited

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , on 5 April 2012 by delclem

The brutal March 1943 massacre in the Belorussian village of Khatyn, commemorated in a 1969 memorial, has come to symbolize the horrors of the German occupation. Given the continuing centrality of the massacre to Belarusian memory politics, the details of the event remain under-studied. For political reasons, Soviet authorities and Ukrainian diaspora nationalists alike had an interest in de-emphasizing the central role of collaborators in carrying out the massacre. Using German military records, Soviet partisan diaries, and materials from Belorussian and Canadian legal cases, the author of this article revisits one of the most infamous, yet least understood war crimes committed on Soviet territory. > Article by Per Anders Rudling. Photo: statue of Iosif Kaminskii at Khatyn memorial site, Belorussia, ca. 1981. (c) Michael Gelb.

WW2 Eyewitnesses from the Weinviertel

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on 4 February 2012 by delclem

“In the new documentary by Simon Wieland Heil Hitler – Die Russen kommen (‘Heil Hitler – The Russians Are Coming’) eyewitnesses recount their individual stories under the swastika and Soviet star. Following a successful road tour through the Weinviertel in Lower Austria, the film will be on general release in Austria from 27 January.” Article (c) wieninternational.at, 2012

“The Suffering Olympics”

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , on 2 February 2012 by delclem

“The ‘double genocide’ wars that pit Stalin’s crimes against Hitler’s are raging in wide swathes of Europe and every now and again along comes a gust from the past to stoke them.” Commentary by Robert Cohen (c) NYT, 2012; illustration by Gianpaolo Pagni.

20 years ago: the Soviet Union dies

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on 26 December 2011 by delclem

“No Ceremony, Only Chimes…”

Obituary by the NEW YORK TIMES, 1991

“Vanished Kingdoms”

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on 25 October 2011 by delclem

Norman Davies´s History of Half-Forgotten Europe
(Allen Lane, RRP£30, 848 pg). Review (c) FT, 2011