I know a lot about US culture and history, good and bad. TV, the cold war and American economic dominance have given me a sense of the good and history books like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and anti US policy protests by people like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore have corrected the idyllic propaganda.
On the other hand I know nothing of the positives in Russian culture. Cold War propaganda and George Orwell's 1984 have left an impression of a totalitarian hell in which millions were slaughtered in Communist purges and in the death camps in Siberia. In modern times Russia is portrayed as a mafia ridden corrupt mess headed by a former KGB madman in which state assets were stolen by the oligarchs and the resulting country is left in a poor and crumbling state with whole cities blighted by AIDS and drug addiction.
I need to learn more. I want to know about some of the positives in Russian life now and then. What do/did people enjoy watching on TV? What literature/music encapsulates the Russian spirit? What good things happened behind the Iron Curtain? I am not prepared to let international politics blight my opinion of the people within a nation that has suffered more than most.
Random anecdotes from The New Shostakovich by Ian MacDonald.
'... in the interval between speeches by Stalin at a conference in the Kremlin during the forties, delegates were offered buckets of salt water to bathe their hands, swollen by hours of clapping.'
'Wife-beating was so thoroughly institutionalised in pre-Revolutionary Russia that a husband who refrained from it was thought abnormal. An old manual of etiquette published in Moscow included instructions to husbands on how to whip their wives 'courteously, lovingly' so as not to blind or deafen them.'
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