Symbols of America

[peacetraveler22]

For the past few weeks, Ilya Varlamov has published posts incorporating photos from Moscow in the late 1980's - early 90's. I love these! Amazing to see how the country looked right before the collapse of the USSR. In today's post, I saw this photo from 1990. A massive queue to enter the first McDonald's in Moscow! I can't imagine such a scene, or how this fast food chain symbolized so much to people at that time. In 1990, I was 17. A senior in high school, getting ready to graduate and enter university, and closely following events overseas.

What other places, items and things did Soviet citizens associate with America before the collapse? My aunt visited Russia in the early 1980's, and she told me stories about locals asking her for bubble gum and wanting to buy her Levi's, straight off her body. This is no joke.

This is what makes Russia so fascinating to me - very rich and diverse history, constantly shifting and changing. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Not sure how most Russians feel about the current direction in which Russia is moving...I hope you feel for the better, because it's depressing and sad to live in a place where you feel absolutely no hope or prospect for the future. I have never once felt this way about my life in America...

Comments

[vasylkivska.livejournal.com]

Ehhhh... no, that would imply Russians didn't see themselves as human. That was certainly not the case.

It is exactly the case

[onkel-hans.livejournal.com]

If Russians had considered themselves Human, they would not have been so hostile to the humans.
Look what they are doing in Ukraine! What they have done in Chechnya.

Russians have a deep inferiority complex. To compensate they consider themselves Superhuman.
As the Russian vernacular says: русские видят себя пиздатыми (1), а все другие видят их хуевыми (2).
(1) means precisely the perceived Superhuman
(2) means not human at all, just the semblance.

Gogol, Humans and HOME

[onkel-hans.livejournal.com]

Yesterday I listened to a lecture of D. Bykov on N. V. Gogol.
He was discussing the difference between Humans (including Ukrainians) and Russians, on the example of the wanderings of Chichikov in The Dead Souls.
The trick is that Humans have a concept of Home. Russians do not have the idea of Home. There is a wonderful German word and concept - HEIMAT. Russians do not understand this. Russians are restless, they wander around, they do not care to improve their homes. Like again - with the Crimea and Ukraine - they go there whereas there is so much to be done in their own Heimat. They do not care.

Re: Gogol, Humans and HOME

[vasylkivska.livejournal.com]

Oh... you are of the russians-walk-the-bears type... yes and yes ans swim i vodka.