Childhood beliefs about Russians

2) All the women are old and wearing scarves, except for a tiny number of young women with ultra-short hair who are obsessed with Levis.

3) Everyone is cold and hungry.

xxpost

I must've heard this seventeen times this weekend.

a) in the russian mafia
b) tax evaders
c) receiving food stamps and welfare checks but raking in truckloads of unreported income

I just wondered if the Russians loved their children too.

"THE PAIN!" < / Kyle MacLachlan >

Oh the history b0oks tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

Oh the Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I's made to memorize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side.

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side.

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

I've learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.

In a many dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.

RED.... DAWN!!

Ha -- that's what we were taught to believe about the Americans!

xpost

Later in those same Olympics I developed a crush on Nadia Comaneci and thought that the Romanians really must have the best political system of all.

Anyway, I guess back then it would have been they all wear furry hats.

All the Russian Bond girls have nothing on underneath their white mink coats.

Ned: I grew up just south of Eureka.. there was a base in Ferndale with a huge cable than ran out into the sea and could tell when an size boat passed over it, even small wooden boats.

In "Fiddler on the Roof" only the Cossacks played these... for a minute, they were kind and partied with the Jews, then the new friendship soured... and swords were drawn!

http://www.portfolioitalia.com/oldtoonshill/natasha.gif

Since I grew up in Canada, I always heard that the Russians played a dirty brand of hockey and that they were soft when it came to the physical stuff, not as weak as the Swedes, but soft enough.

Also brought to you by the Department of WEIRD: my mom is also 1/4 Polish and goes on about it all the damn time. On the bright side, she has her grandmother's golabki recipe.

We had a whole year of USSR class enlivened by a teacher who had been to Moscow and had told us all about NEVER jaywalking in a Communist country. He made us take on the roles of Russians at court/serfs etc. to understand their class system before communism, and chose as the Czar this kid who was related to Trotsky (great-nephew or grandson, I think).

When Glasnost was kicking off my uncle, in his role as head of Special Forces for the Minneapolis police, had to look after the Gorbachevs and their security arrangements. My cousin was too shy to accept Raisa Gorbachev's invitation to lunch.

Also: ballet, gymnastics, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Chekhov. I did a lot of reading about McCarthy and Hollywood when I was really into films from that era.

1) All the women were old and ugly and wore headscarves.

this is true of er...old women. they are also exceptionally when it comes to barding the metro. however, they are so wrapped up in coats etc you can easily roll them away.

of course, the ones that arent old and ugly are in fact often extremely beautiful...

2) People who didn't win in the Olympics were sent to prison.

this is probably not far off the truth....

3) Siberia was literally a non-stop blizzard. this is trueish for 5 months of the year at least. ok maybe its not that bad, siberia doesnt really exist as one entity, i think.

1) They are all drunk all the time. if yr talking men over 40 then.....again not far off. unfortunately this isnt funny.

All the men are called Boris or Ivan.

not exactly true, there are at least 15 different mens names for you to choose from. maybe more if you include southern russia/central asia

anyway, heres a sexy russian chick:

http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:XB8quB2VWNgJ:akter.kulichki.net/terech.jpg

OK the strange occasional similarities between mothers here has gone from occasional to just too much. Maybe it's something about being 1/4th Polish that makes you think that this is some special, special achievement.

the day after! of course. i remember having to go to bed like halfway through.

I think my mom is happy to have a mittel-European culture of her own to stuff her face with as she is the only gentile maker of matzo-ball soup I know of.

Though my grandmother is completely insane.

xpost haha yeah, my ancestry comes from one of the "what country is this again" areas as well, though they were VERY ADAMANT that they were Polish, not Russian/German/Lithuanian/Whatever the hell else.

My younger brother decided to get a Russian penpal through some school thing. (This would have been around 1987 or 88, I guess?) The kid wrote a nice if boring letter. He was from Yakutsk. I looked at the map, and it seemed like an improbably long way for a letter to come, and it seemed like a city situated an amazing distance from everywhere. (And yet I haven't written a double-album about it.)

Anyway, my brother wrote back once, and the kid wrote back again, and then my brother got bored of the project. I felt as though I should write the kid instead, but I had nothing to say to him either.

Hm.
Ever get the uncanny feeling that one of Brothers Gibb might have had a pen pal in Odessa?
Well me neither - until tonight.

The next day, everyone was all freaked out about nuclear war, and I was all "You mean you didn't see the part about PT-109?"

my grandparents.

strangely enough -- seeing as the soviets did some really horrible shit to my family in general and my grandmother in particular -- my childhood beliefs about the russians weren't all that bad. i attribute that in part to the fact that the town where my dad grew up had a sizeable russian population, and that some of my paternal relatives are russian orthodox. though those were the "good" russians, not the "bad" soviet/commie russians.

re mr. warhol: he was ruthenian. said term being kinda interchangeable w/ "rusyn," "carpathian," "carpatho-rusyn," or "lemko." but NOT ukrainian ... the ruthenians i've known are quite adamant that they're NOT ukrainians (or poles). more useless info you get from having slavic relatives who often lived surrounded by other slavs ;-)

OUR COUNTRY? - AMERIKA

If Russians ruled our country
It would have a funny name
The nameAmerica would be spelled with a K
George Was
The Russians would be to blame

If Russians ruled our country
There would be no Independence Day
We would sit very sad in our rooms
Four days and a month after May

If Russians ruled our country
That would be such an awful thought
So I think I'd better stop dreaming
Before I hear "This is Amerika I caught"

[Drawing of a kid with his hair sticking straight up and yelling. Balloon reads "AARGH." To the right, drawing of a guy with a hat probably meant to resemble a bubushka but looking more like a turban. Balloon reads "HEY KID WE RUSSIANS GOT YOUR COUNTRY."]

---

I can't make this up, people. There's a reason I kept this.

OMG you did math for this! You were a smart youngun.

PYCCK

or germany ... never jaywalk in germany! or cross a street when the traffic light is red!

(seriously -- i dunno just what kinda nasty shit happens to germans when they jaywalk or cross on red in germany, but it's apparently so horrible that germans don't even jaywalk or cross on red when they're in another country!!)

By far the most influential religious studies program now in use is that developed by Lee Smith and Wes Bodin of St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Originating in a suburban system near Minneapolis, their course on world religion grew out of a controversy about school holidays. The local community, approximately one-third Lutheran, one-third Jewish and one-third Roman Catholic, was sharply divided. The high school elective course that Smith and Bodin developed has significantly improved interfaith relations. Its carefully crafted materials (filmstrips, tapes and texts) are used nationwide -- indeed, throughout the English-speaking world. Funded by three successive grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the project was able to develop class-tested materials and to enlist the support of recognized historians of religion.

Encounters with Russians:

1. My sister's roommate from college came to stay with us during spring break. I think this was the first time I drank alcohol. She told us about visiting Russia and queueing for potatoes.

2. On the Blue Bus a young attractive Russian man who worked on campus as an electrician or in some other skilled trade was animatedly chatting up a young attractive American woman.

3. On a flight from Detroit to Orange County, a middle-aged man with a grey beard and pleasantly lined face took out a book and read for almost the entire flight - a (unilateral) contest - which I lost. He refused the request of the woman seated between us to change seats with her son. "I would rather sit here." I admired him, but I was false.

4. A research scientist from MIT gave a talk on artificial intelligence. He referred to God in a joke about the impossibility of modeling language. The American scientists repeated it and it wasn't funny anymore.

http://www.missosology.org/2003/missrussia04.jpg

In my youth, I was pretty sure I could make my fortune by just turning up at Red Square with a suitcase full of "bluejeans" and Beatles cassettes.

Also yeah, the Russians would blow us all up one day.

1. Voluble theatrical type I met at a party in Glasgow. When he found out my friend David was Jewish, he instantly fell deeply in love with him and by the end of the night was all but threatening to throw himself out of a window if David didn't at least give him a kiss.

2. Very intense young language student called Artur. I met him along with a group of impossibly blonde and bubbly young Polish women in a bar. I was of course intent on helping the Polish girls polish their language skills, but Artur latched on to me to tell me how much he missed Russia, how Russian women were so much more beautiful than British women (probably true) and how he loved Scotland and wanted to go there and thought there was a deep connection between Russia and Scotland (there is - drinking too much and lachrymose sentimentality). Funnily enough, I think he was gay too. Nice fellow tho, hope he's doing well.

Well, they probably *would* have nuked RAF Kinloss, and also, further south, the USAF base near Brechin. Not to mention Faslane and Rosyth, of course.

that most of russia probably isn't as cold as it is purported to be, because london is at a higher latitude than parts of siberia

that russia probably isn't as poor as it is purported to be, because it didn't look particularly poor in the photos i had seen

that russians was nonetheless a horrible place

ns

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/06/insane-free-skiing-urban-ruins-industrial-russia/2379/

The concrete and steel scaffolding of cities has long provided a playground for skateboarders, parkourists, and stunt cyclists. But for skiers? Really?

Yes, really. The hardcore Finnish free-ski stylists of the group Nipwitz have stormed the urban landscapes of Northern and Eastern Europe and made them into an insane and fabulous laboratory for their particular brand of renegade sport.

Their most recent video shows a trip that they made to Russia’s Murmansk Oblast, a bizarre and contradictory universe of pristine mountains and industrial wasteland beyond the Arctic Circle.

All of my childhood ideas about Russians came from the movie Russkies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmLqdHZfv9I

eg that they were like lost puppies x Balki Bartokomous

^^^one of those kids is a young Joaquin Phx

He was Leaf back then.

My dad gave me a copy of this book - he loved it and said that it was very important...

http://retrobookshop.com/images/products/display/101104a.jpg

Saw this at a very early age...

http://www.theartofmovieposters.com/pages/gallery/DAYBILLS/1966_russiansarecoming.JPG

Haven't seen it since. I can't remember if it was any good.

That Russians loved their children too.

Actually when Chernobyl happened Gorby was so scared about looking bad that he told people in the nearby areas that nothing had happened and it was okay to go outside and let children (like my wife) play in the sun. Now the children have cancer. Please send me that man's head. Thanks.

all the talk about Russian intelligence subs in SF bay earlier in the thread is kinda funny for me because my father served on US intelligence subs that went way close to Russian shores in the 60s.

This semester's class actually laughed when I mentioned being aware of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation as a young child! It's the first time that's happened. This must mark some kind of generational milestone.

you should have told them to hide under their desks

I think the nuclear annihilation thing was very unexamined by most people of that time, though. It felt like a joke back in the 80s. (Though I also thought it was funny that anyone seriously worried about terrorist attacks in the early to mid-00s.)

Aside from those fears, a general sense of their prowess at winter sports and ballet, and our hockey rivalry, I can't remember really having any clear beliefs as to what Russians were like. I remember having a vaguely utopian-anarchist sense that we were all just people who had been thrust into this mess by massive evil institutions.

2xpost It seemed like less of a joke when I was 9!

you should have told them to hide under their desks

OTM (although we didn't even do that anymore).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lznr9DNhK9k

you englishes will get yours when global warming turns off the gulf stream. paradoxical!

i was in the us navy rotc in 1989-90; an older student who had just spent a year abroad in russia basically told us that the ussr was toast. we (and the cia, apparently) were like, whatever. i was in montreal when the shit really went down in august 91 but had other concerns at the time lol.

ppl talk about how the newest generation have always had the web or texting, but it's more striking to me that they didn't grow up with a world that (evidently) required sting's intervention. i was never too upset about the prospect of nuclear war as a kid -- i was comforted by the fact that i was close enough to a major industrial center to be vaporized rather than lingering like 'on the beach'.

I guess I do remember thinking of the East Bloc as grey and oppressive (before moving to utopian-anarchism) because I thought "Free to Be You and Me" was a moving song from the pov of East Europeans who yearned for freedom. I only learned now from Wikipedia that it was a feminist statement.

Oh, and I can swear that I had at least one teacher tell us that Communist governments would determine from a young age what career you were best-suited to and would not give you freedom to choose otherwise. I was told years later by Polish immigrants that this was in fact false.

also i've always been totally fascinated by russia -- its size, its mixed european/asian nature. i enrolled in russian 001 when i was in college, but it became immediately apparent that everyone else in the class either had russian family or went to some crazy private school that taught russian. nyet to that.

Ha, my Dad had to learn Russian as a scientist in Nehru-era India.

I think the nuclear annihilation thing was very unexamined by most people of that time, though. It felt like a joke back in the 80s.

It all depends. Growing up in Orange County during the 70s/early 80s, the rhetoric was such that you would have thought that a Soviet sub was hiding in Newport harbor 24/7. It didn't help that my mom was also a minor-level power player in the OC Republican party and occasionally received John Birch Society mailings. I wasn't alive yet, but during the Cuban Missile Crisis my dad apparently stayed out on the balcony of the house and enjoyed the ocean view while he got sauced on bourbon and announced to everyone "let the missiles fall, I don't give a shit."

I mean, I was 10 when the Berlin Wall fell. If I'd been older in 87/88, I would have probably recognized the relatively low threat of nuclear annihilation.

Then again, when you read about the number of times WWIII could have accidentally started I wonder how we got out of the Cold War alive....

From http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/nuclear-false-alarms.html

THE TRAINING TAPE INCIDENT
Shortly before 9 a.m. on November 9, 1979, the computers at North American Aerospace Defense Command's Cheyenne Mountain site, the Pentagon's National Military Command Center, and the Alternate National Military Command Center in Fort Ritchie, Maryland, all showed what the United States feared most—a massive Soviet nuclear strike aimed at destroying the U.S. command system and nuclear forces. A threat assessment conference, involving senior officers at all three command posts, was convened immediately. Launch control centers for Minuteman missiles, buried deep below the prairie grass in the American West, received preliminary warning that the United States was under a massive nuclear attack.

The alert did not stop with the U.S. ICBM force. The entire continental air defense interceptor force was put on alert, and at least 10 fighters took off. Furthermore, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, the president's "doomsday plane," was also launched, but without the president on board. It was later determined that a realistic training tape had been inadvertently inserted into the computer running the nation's early-warning programs.

THE COMPUTER CHIP INCIDENT
On June 3, 1980, less than a year after the incident involving the training tape, U.S. command posts received another warning that the Soviet Union had launched a nuclear strike. As in the earlier episode, launch crews for Minuteman missiles were given preliminary launch warnings, and bomber crews manned their aircraft. This time, however, the displays did not present a recognizable or even a consistent attack pattern as they had during the training tape episode. Instead, the displays showed a seemingly random number of attacking missiles. The displays would show that two missiles had been launched, then zero missiles, and then 200 missiles. Furthermore, the numbers of attacking missiles displayed in the different command posts did not always agree.
Although many officers did not take this event as seriously as the incident of the previous November, the threat assessment conference still convened to evaluate the possibility that the attack was real. Again the committee reviewed the raw data from the early-warning systems and found that no missiles had been launched. Later investigations showed that a single computer chip failure had caused random numbers of attacking missiles to be displayed.

THE NORWEGIAN ROCKET INCIDENT
Early on the morning of January 25, 1995, Norwegian scientists and their American colleagues launched the largest sounding rocket ever from Andoya Island off the coast of Norway. [Sounding rockets collect data on atmospheric conditions from various altitudes.] Designed to study the northern lights, the rocket followed a trajectory to nearly 930 miles altitude but away from the Russian Federation. To Russian radar technicians, the flight appeared similar to one that a U.S. Trident missile would take to blind Russian radars by detonating a nuclear warhead high in the atmosphere.

That scientific rocket caused a dangerous moment in the nuclear age. Russia was poised, for a few moments at least, to launch a full-scale nuclear attack on the United States. In fact, President Boris Yeltsin stated the next day that he had activated his "nuclear football"—a device that allows the Russian president to communicate with his top military advisers and review the situation online—for the first time.

However, we can be fairly confident that Yeltsin's football showed that Russia was not under attack and that the Russian early-warning system was functioning perfectly. In addition to the string of radars surrounding the border of the former Soviet Union, Russia had inherited a complete fleet of early-warning satellites that, even by 1995, still maintained continuous 24-hour coverage of the U.S. continental missile fields. In the early 1990s Russia had still managed to launch replacement satellites for its early-warning system as the previous ones died out—thereby retaining continuous coverage. Because of those satellites, Yeltsin's display must have shown that no massive attack was lurking just below the horizon.

More here: http://nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/accidents/20-mishaps-maybe-caused-nuclear-war.htm

my best friend's dad was a foreign service officer from the late 60s-early 90s and is a good judge of history. he bristles at suggestions from youngsters that policy was fucked up at the time. we know now that the domino theory and various happenings were no real threat, but they did not know it at the time.

sounds kind of like the 'terrorist threat' but perhaps slightly more reasonable.

We beat 'em in hockey!
http://carletonnow.carleton.ca/ccms/wp-content/uploads/Hockey.jpg

The husband of my biology teacher at school was a high-ranking military scientist and helped write the British version of the Duck and Cover leaflets. iirc, they were something like "when you hear the early-warning siren you have about twenty minutes so create a makeshift bomb shelter by removing four internal doors in your house, painting them white and arranging them around the kitchen table".

It's quite a relief to be slightly too young to have really had any fear about nuclear war.

key text for stoking childhood nuclear fears:

http://www.badmovieplanet.com/unknownmovies/pictures/wind5.jpg

diy bomb shelter in action:

http://www.atomica.co.uk/wtwb1.jpg

"I'm painting myself white to deflect the blast"