So we are approaching March 8th, 2017. Is anything going to be done to mark the occasion? Might the Russians flood into the streets to overthrow a corrupt and autocratic regime to celebrate?
Quote from: Valmy on January 26, 2017, 02:04:46 PM
So we are approaching March 8th, 2017. Is anything going to be done to mark the occasion? Might the Russians flood into the streets to overthrow a corrupt and autocratic regime to celebrate?
Does the American government count? If so they're a few months early :P
Quote from: HVC on January 26, 2017, 02:08:10 PM
Does the American government count? If so they're a few months early :P
Hey! Our regime wasn't that autocratic.
Quote from: Valmy on January 26, 2017, 03:57:53 PM
Quote from: HVC on January 26, 2017, 02:08:10 PM
Does the American government count? If so they're a few months early :P
Hey! Our regime wasn't that autocratic.
We're upsetting the international system at roughly the same order of magnitude.
The Russians now control the White House. They have achieved ultimate victory. Why should they overthrow their victorious leaders?
Quote from: Monoriu on January 26, 2017, 07:53:14 PM
The Russians now control the White House. They have achieved ultimate victory. Why should they overthrow their victorious leaders?
Because the Russian has an inborn desire to fuck himself over. He is his own worst enemy.
Quote from: Valmy on January 26, 2017, 02:04:46 PM
So we are approaching March 8th, 2017. Is anything going to be done to mark the occasion? Might the Russians flood into the streets to overthrow a corrupt and autocratic regime to celebrate?
From what I gather, Russians are pretty happy at the way things are. Any problems they may suffer are the fault of the outsiders and former ennemy countries like the US and NATO members bordering them.
Anything planned in Washington? A joint Caps - US Army parade maybe? ;)
Quote from: viper37 on January 26, 2017, 09:23:08 PM
From what I gather, Russians are pretty happy at the way things are. Any problems they may suffer are the fault of the outsiders and former ennemy countries like the US and NATO members bordering them.
Anything planned in Washington? A joint Caps - US Army parade maybe? ;)
The Caps should get a parade with the season they are enjoying.
Quote from: Valmy on January 26, 2017, 09:35:09 PM
The Caps should get a parade with the season they are enjoying.
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.bleacherreport.net%2Fimages_root%2Fimages%2Fphotos%2F001%2F305%2F674%2F81080545_crop_650x440.jpg%3F1312656619&hash=e102bca8fb00ba867d4d78245ff3c4a473143570)
Quote from: Valmy on January 26, 2017, 02:04:46 PM
So we are approaching March 8th, 2017. Is anything going to be done to mark the occasion? Might the Russians flood into the streets to overthrow a corrupt and autocratic regime to celebrate?
Does it mean after a few more months they get an even worse
régime after a new revolution? :P
Quote from: CountDeMoney on January 26, 2017, 10:44:08 PM
Quote from: Valmy on January 26, 2017, 09:35:09 PM
The Caps should get a parade with the season they are enjoying.
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.bleacherreport.net%2Fimages_root%2Fimages%2Fphotos%2F001%2F305%2F674%2F81080545_crop_650x440.jpg%3F1312656619&hash=e102bca8fb00ba867d4d78245ff3c4a473143570)
True :weep:
Quote from: Duque de Bragança on January 27, 2017, 05:51:48 AM
Quote from: Valmy on January 26, 2017, 02:04:46 PM
So we are approaching March 8th, 2017. Is anything going to be done to mark the occasion? Might the Russians flood into the streets to overthrow a corrupt and autocratic regime to celebrate?
Does it mean after a few more months they get an even worse régime after a new revolution? :P
At least we would have eight months of hope :P
Royal Academy of Arts in London is having a Russian Revolution art show.
I'll be in Saint Petersburg in March so I hope there'll be some celebration.
Quote from: Liep on January 27, 2017, 06:26:37 PM
I'll be in Saint Petersburg in March so I hope there'll be some celebration.
Oh I can't spend tourism dollars in states that hate gays.
Quote from: garbon on January 27, 2017, 04:50:46 PM
Royal Academy of Arts in London is having a Russian Revolution art show.
You've gone full
metropolitan native, haven't you? :bowler:
Quote from: Valmy on January 26, 2017, 09:35:09 PM
The Caps should get a parade with the season they are enjoying.
Yes, they should, since they won't get a Stanley Cup parade :P
Quote from: garbon on January 27, 2017, 07:58:44 PM
Quote from: Liep on January 27, 2017, 06:26:37 PM
I'll be in Saint Petersburg in March so I hope there'll be some celebration.
Oh I can't spend tourism dollars in states that hate gays.
You don't spend money back in the US anymore?
Quote from: mongers on January 27, 2017, 08:47:51 PM
Quote from: garbon on January 27, 2017, 04:50:46 PM
Royal Academy of Arts in London is having a Russian Revolution art show.
You've gone full metropolitan native, haven't you? :bowler:
:hmm:
Quote from: garbon on January 29, 2017, 12:37:13 PM
Quote from: mongers on January 27, 2017, 08:47:51 PM
Quote from: garbon on January 27, 2017, 04:50:46 PM
Royal Academy of Arts in London is having a Russian Revolution art show.
You've gone full metropolitan native, haven't you? :bowler:
:hmm:
Mongers apparently thinks museums are unique to Britain and only British people ever know what exhibitions museums plan for the future. Hence his assumption that you had "gone native" because you discussed a planned museum exhibition.
He doesn't leave The Shire very often, so you can understand his provincialism.
Quote from: grumbler on January 29, 2017, 01:16:42 PM
Quote from: garbon on January 29, 2017, 12:37:13 PM
Quote from: mongers on January 27, 2017, 08:47:51 PM
Quote from: garbon on January 27, 2017, 04:50:46 PM
Royal Academy of Arts in London is having a Russian Revolution art show.
You've gone full metropolitan native, haven't you? :bowler:
:hmm:
Mongers apparently thinks museums are unique to Britain and only British people ever know what exhibitions museums plan for the future. Hence his assumption that you had "gone native" because you discussed a planned museum exhibition.
He doesn't leave The Shire very often, so you can understand his provincialism.
Ah, I see. Well if helps him, I saw the advertisement in a tube station. :D
If, for some reason, you end up at the art show let me know what you think. :P
Quote from: Valmy on January 30, 2017, 09:57:32 PM
If, for some reason, you end up at the art show let me know what you think. :P
I think I might go. I read this very angry piece in the guardian today and well I went to the 'insipid' NYC MoMA show that gets mentioned. If I can't name drop about the transatlantic shows that I've visited, who am I? -_-
By the by, I think the writer misses the point. The MoMA show wasn't extolling the politics behind said avant garde art and I don't know that it would make the pieces better to have placard decrying Leninist barbarism. Maybe to its detriment the MoMA show assumed its audience would be familiar with the art (and its context) it was displaying. Royal Academy might step into same place given that it actually is some art that you have to pay to see in London. :D
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2017/feb/01/revolutionary-russian-art-brutal-propaganda-royal-academy
QuoteWe cannot celebrate revolutionary Russian art – it is brutal propaganda
It was a bizarre moment. I was visiting New York's Museum of Modern Art for the first time, revelling in Duchamp and Brancusi, Cezanne and Schwitters. Then I came across a room that felt like a pious shrine, a white reliquary containing models of unbuilt architecture, posters for a failed utopia. This was MoMA's homage to the art of the Russian revolution. Why did it seem so strange? Because here we were on West 53rd street, in the heart of capitalist Manhattan.
It struck me as intellectually lazy for this museum, so remote from everything the Russian revolution stood for, to apolitically celebrate its art, as if constructivism and suprematism were just cool aesthetic discoveries rather than utopian projects from an age of struggle and violence.
The grand galleries of Burlington House in London seem an equally incongrous setting for such relics, but that's where Tatlin, El Lissitzky and co are about to be venerated in the Royal Academy's blockbuster Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932. The title of this exhibition that starts the centenary of 1917 goes right for the commercial jugular – every young idealist in the country will be clamouring for a ticket.
If the Royal Academy wanted to be honest they might have called it something more like "Black Square: The Russian Tragedy 1917-1932". The way we glibly admire Russian art from the age of Lenin sentimentalises one of the most murderous chapters in human history. If the Royal Academy put on a huge exhibition of art from Hitler's Germany there would rightly be an outcry. Yet the art of the Russian revolution is just as mired in the mass slaughters of the 20th century.
The Bolshevik party took power in October 1917 in a coup that replaced a previous democratic revolution with a totalitarian one. From the beginning, and increasingly as they fought a savage civil war against their opponents, Lenin's Bolsheviks used torture, surveillance and executions to build a one-party state. Rural society was destroyed by the Bolshevik campaign against "kulaks", meaning so-called capitalist peasants – a war on an unreal social enemy that anticipated nazism by demonising an entire category of people. As agriculture collapsed, as a result first of civil war then forcible collectivisation, millions died in famines in 1921-22 and again in 1932-33.
To see Lenin's revolution through rosy specacles as a Good Thing, a "utopian" dream that only went wrong because the wicked Stalin spoiled it all, is to believe in fairy tales. Yet catastrophic as it was, artists sought to provide this revolution with bold modernist propaganda.
The avant garde in Russian art predates 1917. In 1915, Malevich painted his Black Square, a masterpiece that takes the idea of abstract art to its pure monochrome conclusion. Tatlin, influenced by Picasso's cubist assemblages, was already producing Counter Reliefs, abstract constructions that could occupy a corner like a floating city of driftwood.
As the revolution began imposing its ideology, these two great artists gave birth to movements that both claimed to express a utopian vision of a revolutionary future: suprematism, which maps world history and the cosmos as a science fiction geometry of pure forms, and constructivism, which builds the ideal out of the real. The resulting art is undoubtedly some of the most powerful of the 20th century, yet I find the way it is usually exhibited ultimately repellent in its denial of history and glossing-over of violence.
If you think I am exaggerating, consider El Lissitzky's famous 1919 poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. You don't need any knowledge of modern art to understand it – a sharp red triangle is being driven into a black mass like a stake into Dracula's heart. Visual genius, yes, but what is its real historical significance?
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/80ac04d9fbe5b4ea0fb32cad0b7364f8e5554882/0_0_2000_1641/master/2000.jpg?w=620&q=20&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&dpr=2&s=9c25e2404ebd53b673955ef25735d7d9)
It is a very explicit propaganda image that urges support for the Bolshevik army in the civil war that lasted from 1917 to 1922. This war eventually secured Lenin's new state, but at a human cost almost without historical precedent: between 7m and 12m people died. Extreme methods were used by both sides not just in battle but to subdue civilians. The Cheka, the original Bolshevik secret police that still has offspring in Russia today, played a crucial part. The red wedge really was red – with blood.
Nauseatingly, we forget that reality when we celebrate El Lissitzky's poster in an apolitical way or, even worse, admire it as radical chic without asking any questions about what it really represents. It is a call to merciless violence. Did Billy Bragg and Paul Weller worry about that when they borrowed its cool title for a 1980s effort to make pop music political? Nah, they didn't give it a thought.
We will never stop looking at the art of the Russian avant garde, nor should we. Yet we need to place it in its true context. It is a lazy, immoral lie to keep pretending there was anything glorious about the brutal experiment Lenin imposed on Russia – or anything innocent about its all-too-brilliant propaganda art. Perhaps the Royal Academy is about to open that very show, but its shallow title seems all too happy to cash in on revolutionary chic. No doubt the Morning Star's art critic will be there in a flash. Me, I will be remembering the kulaks.
I have seen shows about Nazi propaganda and art before. What a ridiculous article.
Though everybody knows the Italian fascists had the best art amongst totalitarian regimes.
I also find it rather funny that being close to a center of finance would be being remote from everything the Russian Revolution stood for.
Quote from: Valmy on February 01, 2017, 07:09:12 PM
Though everybody knows the Italian fascists had the best art amongst totalitarian regimes.
:yes:
Quote from: HVC on January 26, 2017, 02:08:10 PM
If so they're a few months early :P
This thread is seven months early.
Quote from: Eddie Teach on February 01, 2017, 07:13:40 PM
Quote from: HVC on January 26, 2017, 02:08:10 PM
If so they're a few months early :P
This thread is seven months early.
This thread is about the February Revolution that really happened in March, not the October Revolution that really happened in November.
I have heard that the Russian government wants the message of this centennial to mainly be 'revolution and chaos are really really bad. People suffer so very very much.' Which I find pretty funny. I guess they had the same thought I did in my original post :P
Anyway I thought this was cool: http://www.rferl.org/a/footsteps-of-1917-revolution/28311776.html
Huh. Not much has changed in any of those places besides Gorky Park and putting that ice rink in Red Square.
I think it is an open question how much the two revolutions can really be said to be connected. February, uprising in St Petersburg/Petrograd, Tsar abdicates, provisional government (headed by liberal prince) takes over, continues war among other things. Socialists roaming about. October is the real thing. Wonder which of them Putin would want to associate with? Probably Lenin's...brought powerful leadership at least.
Quote from: Liep on February 01, 2017, 07:11:07 PM
Quote from: Valmy on February 01, 2017, 07:09:12 PM
Though everybody knows the Italian fascists had the best art amongst totalitarian regimes.
:yes:
Oh please. The Spanish put their shit to sleep.
Quote from: Delirium on February 16, 2017, 12:51:27 PM
I think it is an open question how much the two revolutions can really be said to be connected. February, uprising in St Petersburg/Petrograd, Tsar abdicates, provisional government (headed by liberal prince) takes over, continues war among other things. Socialists roaming about. October is the real thing. Wonder which of them Putin would want to associate with? Probably Lenin's...brought powerful leadership at least.
A mass uprising seems more of a real revolution than a coup but that's just me :P
Anyway the Socialists were not 'roaming around' they controlled the majority of offices in the provisional government. Like Kerensky.
I think people would debate you on both points, was it a "mass uprising" and did Lenin just perform a "coup"?
In any case I think the future Soviet Union decided the matter by quite clearly defining the October revolution as their cherished moment of glory.
To make sure I'm a decadent transatlantic sodomite, I'll be seeing the Royal Academy's show with a uni (college) friend of mine in a few weeks. Mentioning Malevich had her hooked. :cool:
Quote from: Delirium on February 16, 2017, 05:10:39 PM
I think people would debate you on both points, was it a "mass uprising" and did Lenin just perform a "coup"?
In any case I think the future Soviet Union decided the matter by quite clearly defining the October revolution as their cherished moment of glory.
The Soviet Union decided many things, but I think they rarely did so in a manner that was particularly convincing to anybody outside of their bubble :P
The February Revolution was obviously a mass uprising, it was unplanned and spontaneous. The October Revolution was in the style of the Insurrection of August 10th in that other more awesome revolution.
:hmm:
You realize the Soviet Union were a pretty big thing?
I submit that when we refer to the 'Russian Revolution' 99 out of 100 people think of Lenin and what brought on the Soviet Union.
And that is unfair, but if there is no Lenin and Soviet Union with all that follows from that which is a HUGE historical turning point in the 20th century then we would not talk more of the February revolution than the German November revolution of 1918. That is not to say that they are unimportant events, but not the watershed of October, whether we like it or not.
Quote from: Delirium on February 17, 2017, 12:50:58 PM
:hmm:
You realize the Soviet Union were a pretty big thing?
It was. Since it is no longer that has us regard the revolution a bit differently doesn't it?
QuoteI submit that when we refer to the 'Russian Revolution' 99 out of 100 people think of Lenin and what brought on the Soviet Union.
That would make sense, as it did eventually put Lenin into power. But like all revolutions there plenty of twists and turns along the way.
QuoteAnd that is unfair, but if there is no Lenin and Soviet Union with all that follows from that which is a HUGE historical turning point in the 20th century then we would not talk more of the February revolution than the German November revolution of 1918. That is not to say that they are unimportant events, but not the watershed of October, whether we like it or not.
I did not say Red October, nor the Insurrection of 10 August, were not important events. I only said the February Revolution was a real deal revolution. A socialist government was pretty inevitable at this point. The question was would it be the SRs and Mensheviks or the Bolsheviks heading it up? That was decided by the Coup.
And I am not sure I agree with the assertion it would not be as important as November 1918 in Germany. If the French Revolution had created a stable Constitutional Monarchy would 1789 not have been a big deal?
I guess I consider the 'Russian Revolution' to be something that goes from the 8th of March until the 8th of November 1917.
So it seems that the Russian Government has spent some effort rehabilitating White Generals like Denikin and Kolchak over the years. That is very interesting. I wish we had a poster in Russia just so I could get a good idea of how the Revolution is being acknowledged this year.
Quote from: Valmy on February 17, 2017, 02:22:17 PM
So it seems that the Russian Government has spent some effort rehabilitating White Generals like Denikin and Kolchak over the years. That is very interesting. I wish we had a poster in Russia just so I could get a good idea of how the Revolution is being acknowledged this year.
I've read a couple of articles that it is very much being down-played, and no celebrations are planned. Mostly it's because under Putin the concepts being stressed are "stability", not "revolution".
Finally saw the exhibit at the Royal Academy. They had some nice pieces including works by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin whose stuff I'd never seen and a replica room of a living space designed by El Lissitzky. Also a lot of photographs of artists which were kind of cool to see.
They definitely were very worried though not to be glorifying communism. Many of the works were accompanied with a blurb about how the artist was shot, sent to a gulag, starved to death in a siege, etc. Near the end there was also a small room where they projected mugshots of various individuals killed by Stalin. Seemed rather unnecessary.
Quote from: Valmy on February 01, 2017, 07:09:12 PM
Though everybody knows the Italian fascists had the best art amongst totalitarian regimes.
(https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Bi15CzneDxI/V2R6d9gdpHI/AAAAAAAAKYk/zNUX_bX0GHIzuAnLWaE2HztCAw-l6AisgCLcB/s1600/The%2Bheadquarters%2Bof%2BMussolini%2527s%2BItalian%2BFascist%2BParty%252C%2B1934.jpg)
I'm with Valmy in the idea that ouster of the czar was a revolution and the Lenin launched a coup. You know, if anyone would have a legitimate stab-in-the-back legend you'd think it would be the Russians.
Quote from: Barrister on February 17, 2017, 02:57:13 PM
Quote from: Valmy on February 17, 2017, 02:22:17 PM
So it seems that the Russian Government has spent some effort rehabilitating White Generals like Denikin and Kolchak over the years. That is very interesting. I wish we had a poster in Russia just so I could get a good idea of how the Revolution is being acknowledged this year.
I've read a couple of articles that it is very much being down-played, and no celebrations are planned. Mostly it's because under Putin the concepts being stressed are "stability", not "revolution".
Though Putin is sometimes believed to be trying to bring back the USSR, it's likely he's more keen on the Czarist empire instead. It was even bigger, and without the communist baggage.