able was i, ere i saw elbe

On this day in 1945, we are informed via Miss Cellania, US Forces of the Western Front encountered Soviet Forces of the Eastern Front crossing the Elbe near Torgau—first contact between advancing armies had effectively cut Nazi Germany in two.
After initial meetings of scouting parties, arrangements were made to hold a formal handshake between commanders and soldiers exchanged greetings and gifts. Commemorations for the meeting—Elbe Day (Встреча на Эльбе), have been held annually to lesser or greater fanfare with reunions of participating units and was considered an especially occasion to mark during the antagonism of the Cold War as a sign of cooperation and peace that could overcome geopolitics. More pictures and background at the link above.

do the sabre dance

A short movement in the final act of his ballet Gayane, premiering in Moscow in 1942, composer and choreographer Aram Khachturian (*1903 – †1978, the Georgian artist’s music later denounced by the state as “anti-people”) lamented how this one section based on an Armenian folk dance deflected from the rest of his repertoire, in 1948 becoming a jukebox hit in the United States and elsewhere and being reinterpreted by various charting artists, including a lounge and boogie version in the early 1960s.

over a barrel

Though this extraordinary development has not yet translated to free petrol at stations, the total collapse in worldwide demand for oil and full reserves and reservoirs with no excess storage capacity, a key valuation benchmark in the market has inverted the price per barrel, failing to a negative thirty-seven dollars, meaning that traders looking to offload shares would be paying a premium to do so. The situation has been exasperated by America increasing domestic production through fracking, becoming a full-fledged, failing petrostate and glutting the market in the process and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia and highlights yet another problem with non-renewable fuel sources that’s a least been partially redress on the renewable market—that of portability and shifting energy and resources to where and where it’s needed.

avtomobilny

Sold domestically as the Zhiguli (Жигули, after the mountain range bordering the Volga) and branded as the “Lada” for export (see previously, the designation being an earlier variation for the region in reference to the pirate gangs encamped in the valleys), the automotive manufacturer introduced its VAZ-2101, the initialism standing for Volga Automotive Plant. With seven models in the series, some seventeen million cars were produced until the line was discontinued in 2012—manufacturing at an Egyptian factory continuing until 2014.

sıcak caz

After being directed to Open Culture’s nice primer on Japanese jazz sessions—that I could play as ambient music all day—from Nag on the Lake, I was excited to see an expanded, cosmopolitan coffee break set pieces from the same DJ Zag Erlat playing vinyl grooves from Africa, Brazil, Bollywood, Russia and Anatolian rock from his native Turkey. Most of the selections date from the 1970s and make me want to go crate-digging at the first opportunity. Sample all the genres of Erlat’s Analog Journal at the links above.

hedgehog in the fog

Our friends over at Calvert Journal have curated a selection of Soviet-era cartoons and stop animation programmes that are certainly deserving of one’s nostalgia and a welcome break from focusing on the ongoing crises of the present. Clips include Crocodile Gena and his Friends along with other children’s classics and the 1975 titular work by esteemed, award-winning animator Yuri Norstein.

data-plan or seward’s folly

Though criticism for US Secretary of State’s negotiated purchase (see also) of the territory of Alaska from the Russian Empire—agreed to on this day in 1867—was much more reserved and the decision and price praised by most in the government at the time and only magnified through the lens of history, hindsight and self-promotion on the part of his detractors, William Henry Seward’s shrewd deal-making had failed him in another arena that resulted in a quite expensive misstep just a few months earlier.
The Secretary of State was honoured with inaugurating the first enduring transatlantic cable on 23 November 1866 (see also) and elected to dispatch a diplomatic telegram—and not merely a ceremonial message but an actual missive encrypted regarding Napoleon III perceived meddling in the affairs of Mexico using a Monroe cipher since the Department of State was footing the bill. The Anglo-American Telegraph company however stipulated that coded messages cost double and that numbers (the basis of the cipher) were required to be spelled out in full. In the end, the brief message cost the State Department nearly twenty-thousand dollars—thrice the chief’s diplomat’s annual salary. Seward disputed the charges in court but ultimately lost.

8x8

expansion pack: kit and ideas for remixing new board games by combining pieces and platforms of classic games one already owns—via Kottke’s Quick Links

video phone: the teleconferencing tool that’s being forced on many of us is a privacy and security nightmare whose long-term liabilities far outweigh the benefits of seeing colleagues in pyjamas

razliv haystack: a look into how the mythos of Lenin fuelled the early Soviet tourism industry

stay sane, stay safe: a graphic design community’s rapid response to promote positivity

at home everywhere: with at least a quarter of the world’s population under at least partial lockdown, a design duo has turned national flags into houses

utica club: beer steins Schultz and Dooley (voiced by Jonathan Winters) advertise Matt Brewery’s flagship beverage

tossed dallas: Tuna Antipasto and assorted silliness—see previously

mashrabiya and mezzanine: a celebration of balconies

7x7

a healed fracture: anthropologist Margaret Mead fields a student’s question about the earliest hallmarks of civilisation

money tree: the 1964 New York World’s Fair American Express Pavilion

pivot point: watch the ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment shift their rhetoric on COVID-19

byob: a virtual bar in Saint Petersburg lets people socialise while eliminating the possibility of contagion

dragula: an 80’s jazzercise video synchronised to the Rob Zombie song (in turn the namesake of Grandpa Munster’s race car)—via Memo of the Air

chaotic good: a social-distancing alignment chart

delightful creatures: with the city under lockdown and the waters waning cleaner, dolphins are returning to the canals of Venice after sixty years

равноде́нствие

This moment marks the point when our friends in the northern hemisphere experience the vernal or northward equinox when the apparent motion of the Sun crosses from the celestial southern hemisphere on its March towards the Tropic of Cancer. After this transition, for those for whom this day signals the start of Spring, the daylight hours gradually start getting longer.
At extreme climes (high latitudes) during the equinoctial day, the Sun is seen to move along the horizon, marauding at dawn and dusk and extending twilight to a couple of hours in duration. Idiomatically, the card means that the new season is just around the corner—literally in Russian, on the tip of one’s nose.

комбат

Born on this day in 1899, prominent Soviet photographer Max Vladimirovich Alpert (†1980) is best remembered for his iconic image Kombat (short for battalion commander).
Though the date and the subject are not known for certain, an investigative reconstruction of events undertaken in the 1970s are reasonably certain that the political commissar—the Politruk, the officer with the responsibility of political education of their assigned unit—of the battalion who took command after the actual Kombat was incapacitated, Aleksei Yeryomenko, is shown rallying his troops for a counter-attack against the German offense. Research dates the picture to 12 July 1942 on a battlefield in Luhansk (then called Voroshilovgrad) Oblast in far eastern Ukraine, skirmishes intending to halt the advance Fall Blau (Case Blue, the codename for this summer campaign and continuation of Operation Barbarossa) towards Stalingrad.

on the cult of personality and its consequences

Though leaked contemporaneously by Mossad and intermediaries to the press, Nikita Khrushchev’s so called “secret speech” («О культе личности и его последствиях») that was critical of deifying the past and of Joseph Stalin’s brutal purges in the name of promoting communist ideals delivered on this day in 1956 to a closed session during the twentieth party congress of the Soviet Union, transcripts of the text were not officially released until 1989 under the auspices of Mikhail Gorbachev’s campaign of glasnost.

The denunciation marked a shocking departure from the unified and coherent propaganda of the day and while notably removing the body of Stalin from public view and interring it in the Kremlin necropolis signified an internal shift (pivotal without qualifications—though his reforms and liberalisation had well-defined limits—the speech a catalyst for uprisings in Hungary and Poland, the author also summarily suppressed them), the aftermath of this revelation accrued greater and more immediate external changes with membership dropping precipitously in the Communist Party in the US and UK over Stalin’s violence and the political, ideological schism between the USSR and China, who condemned Khrushchev as a revisionist and self-serving.

quid pro quo-so little time, so much to know

Though the White House vehemently denies the claim and only knows the messager as an ex-congressman from California, a member of Julian Assange’s defence team, during a preliminary hearing at the Magisterial Court of Westminster, intimates that his client was visited by Trump cheerleader and noted Russian apologist Dana Rohrabacher while still given sanctuary at the Ecuadorian Mission to the UK back in 2017 at Trump’s biding to offer ‘a pardon or some other way out’ if Mister Assange goes along with the administration’s counter-narrative and state that Russia had no involvement in breaking into the Democratic National Committee's services during the presidential campaign and releasing compromising emails.
Although the tranche of messages were published on the same WikiLeaks platform, the charges that the US government is levying against Assange predate the DNC hack and exposed systemic war crimes perpetrated evinced by diplomatic cables and communiques, and his attorneys are challenging his extradition to America to face charges and a potential prison term of one hundred and seventy-five years. Assange maintains that he will never reveal a source, neither confirming nor denying Russian participation, and that he would never address the public through a third-party emissary.

argonaut conference

Following on from the Tehran Conference held in November of 1943 under the above code-name, the leaders of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union—with the conspicuous absence of French and other Allied Forces, convened near the Black Sea resort of Yalta in a palatial ensemble on the city’s outskirts beginning on this day in 1945 to address the reorganisation and self-determination Europe and Germany post-war. Though the ostensible objectives were to promote peace and reestablish invaded and annexed nations status quo all parties to the talk came with their own agendas and shortly after peace was achieved with liberation from Nazi Germany declared the Cold War erupted.

Churchill wanted to extend Western style democracies through central and eastern Europe. Roosevelt wanted the Soviet Union to join the United Nations and pressed Stalin for his support in fighting Imperial Japan in the Pacific. Stalin, having accomplished and sacrificed the most militarily and had a domineering presence in comparison to the other negotiators, insisted that the Soviet Union retain a sphere of influence in eastern Europe and the Balkans. After some rigorous debate, it was settled that Germany would be split into four occupied zones (with the French concession carved out of the British and American zones, with an exploratory committee examining further dismemberment of Germany into six nations) and undergo war crimes trials and de-militarisation, a reparations council would be established, and Stalin pledged free elections in a restored Poland and allowed American bombers to pre-position in its Far East. Dissatisfied with the outcome of the Crimean and the later Potsdam summit and growing wise to the voting system of the UN and the veto powers that the USSR would have, Churchill commissioned (in secret) the first Cold War contingency plans—Operation Unthinkable—to dislodge Soviet troops in Germany and liberate Poland should Stalin not uphold his end of the bargain, but such actions were deemed too risky from a geopolitical standpoint and were abandoned.

6x6

kórsafn: Björk collaborates with an technology company to produce background music that changes with the weather and seasons

de arte gymnastica: Ask the Past prescribes an exercise regimen from a 1560 volume

8½: a centenary celebration of filmmaker Federico Fellini

langmuir waves: a sonic sample of the solar winds

blogoversary: Boing Boing enters its third decade for the second time (see also about its earlier incarnation)

godunov, badenov: the Russian succession crisis and the curious case of the false Dmitris

how to teach your cat to do tricks: uncovering the art studio behind WikiHow‘s signature illustrations, via Super Punch

dansa ut julen

Literally dancing out Christmas, some Swedish communities are celebrating Knut’s Day (previously) as the end of the holiday season by “plundering” the tree of its ornaments and ceremoniously tossing it out on this twentieth day (imagine that carol) of Yule—Tjugondag jul—set aside as Knut’s name day (see also).

Transposed from the date (except in Denmark) of the regicide of the Danish duke at the hand of his rival and cousin on 7 January 1131 due to it failing too close to the Feast of the Epiphany, for the past century and the present one, Saint Knut’s Day coincides with Malanka (Маланка—that is Щедрий Вечір, Generous Eve) or since the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1918 and putting aside the Julian one, Old New Year’s Eve for Ukraine, Russia and other Slavic lands. A syncretism of a far older folktale with instruction on how to herald the coming return of Spring and renewal and the observation that the Sun begins to turn toward the Tropic of Capricorn (the sidereal solstice and Midwinter for those in the Northern Hemisphere), it is also the last opportunity for partying and abandon before Carnival.

no identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings and products is intended or should be inferred

Though we could not recite this disclaimer from memory, it’s certainly familiar to all of us, having been driven into the audience’s psyche as a cinematic preamble for any work of pure or historical fiction. From a litigious perspective, we understand we the distributors are coming from but did not realise until thanks to Miss Cellania, it stemmed from one specific 1932 character defamation lawsuit—involving no less than Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin.
The MGM studio debuted the film Rasputin and the Empress (the only movie starring all three of the Barrymore siblings together) which suggested that one of the princess characters was raped by the charismatic advisor to the House of Romanov and that particular portrayal was intended to be Princess Irina Alexandrovna, surviving the Bolshevik revolution as the sole niece of Tsar Nicholas II. The princess and her husband, Count Felix Felixovich Yusupov whom also participated in the assassination of Rasputin, successfully sued the production company for libel and an additional out of court settlement. The feature began with the introductory claim that “This concerns the destruction of an empire… A few of the characters are still alive—the rest having met their death by violence,” a statement that was completely overhauled to own that it was not a historically accurate portrayal of events at all. To avoid further lawsuits, it was removed from circulation for decades until Irina Alexandrovna’s death in 1970. Be sure and visit the link up top to hear the rest of the story and its legacy.

porf and potus

On this day in 1999 when the first President of the Russian Federation (Президе́нт Росси́йской Федера́ции) the guarantor of the constitution, commander-in-chief and highest office chosen by popular election, Boris Yeltsin resigned his commission over domestic dissatisfaction with his reform efforts (see previously), and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency.
A statutory hiatus between Putin’s second and third terms (the law establishing that none can serve more than two consecutive terms) ushered in the caretaker government of Putin's own Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev from 2008 to 2012, allowing Putin again to stand in elections that year. Yeltsin is seen here bestowing Putin with the livery collar or chain of office, a ceremonial insignia of the presidency, like the sash, worn on special occasions. Although there is no law prohibiting a partisan presidency, by convention all incumbents have dropped party affiliation while in office.

8x8

getränkekiste: photographer Bernhard Lang features bottle crates from novel perspectives, via Nag on the Lake

россумские универсальные роботы: a 1979 children’s book series illustrated by Mikhail Romadin (*1940 – †2012) of Tarkovsky studios, whom went on to draw for Ray Bradbury and others

uranometria: stars captured on older stellar charts now seemingly vanished could point incognito alien civilisations, via Strange Company

accessory dwelling unit: architecture graduate creates prefabricated homes out of Hawaii’s problematic, invasive Albizia trees

fiat tender: giving cash as a gift but at the same time keeping the personal touch

i demand a recount: “Me and the Boys” voted community choice Meme of 2019, followed closely by “Woman Yelling at a Cat”

chinampa: a look at the fading, ancient practise of floating farming along the canals of Xochimilco

64x64: favourite photographs of the year by as many photographers

7x7

rebirth of a salesman: revisiting a 1969 documentary that revealed how evangelism and door-to-door sales converged

новогоднее дерево: the evolution of the Yolka New Year’s Tree—from its pagan roots to Soviet anti-religious symbolic staple (see also)

mamurluk: also home to the Museum of Break-Ups, a new gallery space dedicated to hangovers opens in Zagreb

now that’s a name i’ve not heard in a long time: a fan-made Obi-Wan Kenobi Star Wars story

intern’yet: reportedly, Russia successfully unplugs from the world wide web and replaced global portals with domestic ones

bergkristall: Adalbert Stifter’s timeless, beloved 1845 novella

open conference bridge: a team of volunteers are retrofitting and reviving a network of payless, pay phone booths to bring community cohesion