Monday, August 22, 2005
Today's Trip Pic
As I post pictures from our wonderful vacation, I am doing it somewhat at random. We had a stop between Stockholm and St. Petersburg Russia, but this article made me want to do this. It's an article about dealing with a statue of Vladimir Iliych Lenin in Berlin and the role it is playing in their upcoming elections.By the way, I took Russian in college and I personally did the transliteration of "Blogotional" to the Russian cyrillic you see in this logo. I claim nothing resembling expertise, so if you think I screwed up, by all means, tell me how to do it right.
The rest of the pictures in this post are from my 1991 visit to the Soviet Union which included, among 4 cities and several side trips, then Leningrad. This trip, I really missed all the representations of the Soviet biggies, and Lenin in particular. During the Soviet days that place had a bit of a 'Disneyland' fell to it.
Just like you cannot escape the Disney characters and images in Disneyland, in the Soviet Union, you simply could not escape the images of Lenin -- in every conceivable form.
And, just like in Disneyland, the images were in every imaginable medium.
Now, I have to say, my nostalgia for these images is mine alone. As a westerner in the Soviet Union, they represented a curiousity, an over-the-top bit of braggidocia. To the citizens of that very oppressed nation, they were nothing but symbols of that oppression, an ever-constant reminder of the ever-watchful eye of the state. What to me was kitcsh, was to them terrifying. St. Petersburg has left one statue standing in front of an old government building in which Soviet symbology is a definitive part of the architecture as a reminder of that which was. I think that appropriate, as the removal of overwhelming presence of Vladimir Ilyich everywhere else.
