Please specify which revolution

Our triumph in space is the hymn to Soviet country!

This bit of Soviet space propaganda looks strangely familiar.

Oh, dear

Oh, yes.  That's it.

An object lesson about why you should always step backwards and take a good look at what your message is actually saying.

Soviet Future Past or there's a tractor in your future

Interesting, but a bit too Five Year Planny for my tastes

Red Moon

Curse those running dog Capitalists and their reliable technology!

The BBC's Pallab Ghosh cries in his beer about how if the Soviets had got to the Mon first, we'd have (Red) moonbases and cheap (Red) flights to Mars by now.  Why?  Because,

Had the Soviets got to the Moon first it is unlikely that they would have abandoned it as swiftly as the Americans. Not being a democracy may have enabled the USSR to spend money and marshal the talents of their population in a way that America could not.

Yes, because that whole command economy thing worked out so well!.  If you believe that, I've got a secondhand ZAZ to sell you.  Moonbases? Odds are that if the Communists had got to the Moon first, they'd have spent most of their effort on jamming radio transmissions so the Free World wouldn't hear the poor stranded bastard on the floor of Mare Imbrium using his last remaining breaths of air to curse the swine back home for sending him on a suicide mission.  Not that I'm surprised at such a  Red nostalgia conclusion from this puff piece.  It's wrong on most major points and doesn't even bother to mention Dr Wernher Von Braun.

Oh, and it has this little gem as well:

Of course, we have not been back since. Instead, human exploration of space has been confined to low-Earth orbit.

Eh?   What alternate universe has Mr Ghosh been living in for the past forty years?  We've sent several probes to Moon–not to mention all the planets and an assortment of asteroids and comets.  I'd say we've been a very busy little race and... Oh, I see, he means manned exploration!

The BBC really has to do something about their copy editing.

Red design

Hang on, I had one of these back at Oxford.

Popular Science looks at some of the dafter examples of Soviet design.

Radio Shackski

And now,Soviet-era consumer goods courtesy of the People's We Don't Give A Toss Design Bureau.

Via Retro Thing.

1K17

Before it crawled into the dustbin of history, the Soviets developed a tank wielding a dirty big laser.

And the selfish buggers never told anybody.

Treason: '70s style

Anatoly Chernyaev’s diaries show the bullet that Britain dodged.

These diaries indicate that, by the 1970s, an alternative government was in place, handpicked by Moscow to take over the apparatus of the British state once the Cold War was lost. There would be a Soviet-style power split: real power would rest in the chairmanship and the bureaucracy, with the politicians simply the front men. Some of the Labour men the Soviets were grooming were paid agents, others fellow travellers. Yet even front-rank politicians were pathetically anxious to reach some kind of understanding with the Soviet regime.

And Mr Gordon Brown recently praised to the rafters the late Jack Jones, a paid up KGB agent who spied on Britain for 45 years.

Ah, well. At least Brown didn't slap a knighthood on Arthur Scargill, a lifelong Stalinist and proud of it, so we can thank Heavens for small favours.

Lightly Grilled Sir Bernard

The Soviets tried to assassinate Sir Bernard Lovell, the man behind the Jodrell Bank radio telescope and unsung hero of the Cold War, using the world's largest death ray.

Well, according to the Times article, he is one of the world's most eminent astrologers.

Moscow... of the FUTURE

Good thing they never built this one. pulling down that statue of Lenin would have been a bugger.

Mind you, there's still one statue of the old monster still extant in Seattle, WA. Pity I can't afford the $250,000 asking price for it. I've always wanted to play with an anti-tank missile.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel laureate author who demonstrated that truth is to tyrants as penicillin is to syphilis, has passed on at the age of 89.

Rest well, sir.

The Forsaken

A review of a harrowing new book by Tim Tzouliadis that tells the story about how thousands of Depression-era Americans bought into the lies spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty about the glories of Stalinism, emigrated to the Soviet Union in search of Utopia, and ended up dying in the Gulags for their gullibility.

Proof that Champagne Communism is not just a charming Islington eccentricity.

Red Snow

Dark Roasted Blend has a look at great Soviet snow machines.

We are deep in Thunderbirds territory here.

Shuttlski

Buran: The "other" space shuttle.

Stalin's "Supermen"

According to the Scotsman, Stalin had a lot in common with Dr. Vornoff.

THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

I guess that's what they really meant by the New Soviet Man.

Come to think of it, given that Homo Sovieticus was essentially a mindless brute with all human thought and sympathy bred out of him, it probably isn't that much of a joke.

Road to Nowhere

The stupidity of tyranny: An abandoned railway in Siberia that goes from nowhere to nowhere; built for no other reason than a bizarre whim of Stalin's that no one dared question.

Sputnik at Fifty

Fifty years ago the Soviet Union ushered in the Space Age with the launch of Sputnik.

A pity it had to also be a certified brown-trouser moment for free men everywhere.

Gorbachev Bagged.

Former leader of the former Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev has landed a deal to endorse French luggage bags. What makes this footnote interesting is this anodyne assessment of Mr. Gorbachev's career by the BBC:

Mr Gorbachev's far-reaching reforms of the Soviet system accelerated the collapse of communism in the 1980s.

Far reaching reforms indeed. It's pity that the Beeb feels it unnecessary to point out that the collapse of Communism and the disintegration of the USSR are exactly the opposite of what Mr. Gorbachev intended when he launched Glasnost.

A tiny detail, but a telling one.

Video Games For The Glory Of The Worker's Paradise

Why we won the Cold War.