Sunshine Recorder

Between September 1941 and January 1944, Leningrad was besieged by Nazi Germany, during which time three-quarters of a million inhabitants starved to death. The Nazis “prosecuted a classical siege, preventing, so far as possible, all movement of people and goods in and out of the city, using air and ground bombardment to destroy food stocks, utilities, factories, hospitals, schools and housing,” writes Anna Reid in “Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944” (Walker and Company), the first full-scale narrative of the event in more than four decades.

“The siege of Leningrad has been paid rather little attention in the West … despite the fact that Leningrad was the first city in all Europe that Hitler failed to take,” offers the author in the book’s introduction. Part of the reason is that the Soviets actively obscured the truth, while military historians have long preferred to focus on the battles for Stalingrad and Moscow. Reid’s history addresses everything from the Nazis’ deliberate decision to starve Leningrad, to the incompetence and cruelty of Soviet leadership, to the terrible details of life in the blocked city.

Perhaps most notably, Reid contends that the death toll would have been far lower under a different sort of government, one better prepared and more responsive to the challenges faced by the city’s citizens. “Failing to empty Leningrad of its surplus population before the siege ring closed was one of the Soviet regime’s worst blunders of the war, leading to more civilian deaths than any other save the failure to anticipate Barbarossa itself,” writes Reid, who graciously took the time to answer Failure’s questions about the siege.

Why has the siege of Leningrad received relatively little attention from historians?

In Russia, this isn’t true: the siege has received lots of attention, just attention of the wrong sort. Under Communism, honest history-writing was pretty much impossible on any subject, of course, but especially so on the siege of Leningrad, since the vast civilian death toll begged so many questions about the competence of the wartime leadership. Why was the German invasion such a surprise? Why were the German armies allowed to encircle the city? Why weren’t more food stocks laid in, or surplus civilians evacuated, before the siege ring closed? How fair was the rationing system? What did Leningraders really think of Andrei Zhdanov and the city’s other Party bosses?

Until Gorbachev’s glasnost Russian historians had no hope of addressing these kinds of questions: their job was to polish an uplifting story of heroic national resistance amidst extraordinary suffering. This didn’t require them to make things up—the heroism and the suffering were real—but it did mean leaving a great deal out. Taboos included the shocking waste of the People’s Levy (a 135,000-strong civilian militia thrown into the front line, without weapons or training, from late July 1941), the encirclement and loss of the Second Shock Army in the spring of 1942, the deaths of tens of thousands on the chaotic Ice Road, endemic theft and corruption within the food distribution system, and continuing political repression. (Ordinary, patriotic Leningraders continued to be arrested by the thousands, even as they died of hunger.) Also left out were the inevitable pathologies of all starving societies: murder, mugging and looting, the collapse of families and friendships, and most notoriously, the scavenging of corpse-meat for food. The distortions and exclusions didn’t only serve a political purpose, they also gave genuine psychological comfort to the three generations whose lives were blighted by the war. Even today, siege historians—mostly themselves St. Petersburgers—feel constrained by a deep sense of respect towards the dwindling band of siege survivors. Debate may become franker, ironically, when the last blokadniki have passed away.

On coverage of the siege in the West: until the last fifteen years or so, the whole Eastern Front was hopelessly under-reported. Partly this was because we were more interested in the campaigns—France, Italy, North Africa—in which our own troops fought; partly because Soviet censorship blocked access to Russian primary sources. It’s nevertheless extraordinary that my book is one of only two general histories of the blockade (the other is Michael Jones’s “Leningrad: State of Siege”) to have come out since Harrison Salisbury’s “900 Days” in the 1960s.

Inside the city, which people were most likely to survive? Who was at the bottom of the food hierarchy?

At the top of the food hierarchy, predictably, were staff at the city Party headquarters (a trades union official’s recently released diary lovingly describes the bread and butter, pork and steamed cabbage on offer in the canteen), and people who worked within the food distribution system, within which theft and corruption were widespread. Many diarists complain of bosses skimming their allotted rations, or of “plump” and bejeweled girls behind the counters in the bread shops. Also privileged—though far less so—were factory workers and the staff of prestigious institutions such as the Academy of Sciences and the Hermitage. Their workplaces were less likely to close down, condemning them to a “dependent’s” ration card (nicknamed the smertnik, from the Russian word for “death”). They were also likelier to have some sort of light and heat, and access to food parcels sent by air from Moscow. The poet Olga Berggolts, for example, was able to distribute coffee, chocolate, oranges and other luxuries to friends thanks to her job at the city radio station.

At the bottom of the food hierarchy came the poor and unskilled (in apartment buildings and offices, janitors and cleaning ladies were often the first to die), the peasant refugees who arrived in the suburbs with their carts and cattle ahead of the German armies, and teenage “factory-school boys”—village boys sent to board in the city and train as industrial workers. These latter groups were more or less abandoned by the authorities. (The Party archives are full of examples of food allotted them being skimmed or stolen.) The very earliest reports of starvation deaths come from the suburban towns in which peasant refugees were penned (they were not allowed into the city center), and factory-school boys became notorious for mugging for bread. There are no reliable figures for the death rate amongst either group, but it was certainly well above the average twenty-five or thirty percent. 

To what extent was crime and cannibalism a problem during the siege?

One of the regime’s most remarkable achievements was that while crime—including the looting of bread shops and bread-carts—was widespread during the siege, Leningrad never descended into lawlessness. Survivors’ recollections of the first, mass death siege winter are not of disorder, but of emptiness and quiet. One told me that yes, she had been afraid when walking through the streets alone, but not because she feared crime—in fact, she only learned that there was any long afterwards, by reading about it. At the time she felt “alone in the city, absolutely alone. I would walk to the shop and back, enter our courtyard, climb the stairs and go in my door. If anyone had wanted to they could have pushed me over with their little finger. But I never met a soul.”

The most notorious crime of the siege was cannibalism, but it was not widespread. A total of 2,015 people were arrested for “the use of human meat for food” between December ’41, when the first cases were reported, and the end of 1942, when they finally petered out. Even taking into account under-reporting (rank and file police were starving too) this represents less than a thousandth of a pre-siege population of 2.5 million. And the vast majority of “cannibals” were not the bestial lowlifes of Soviet legend, but the respectable poor. Sixty-four percent, the police reports tell us, were women; over ninety-percent had only a basic education, forty-four percent were jobless, and only two percent had a criminal record. Case reports also often mention—perhaps in an unspoken plea for clemency—that the arrestee was unsupported (her husband being dead or at the front) and had children. “Cannibals,” in other words, were ordinary working-class women, scavenging protein to feed their families.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a Soviet sniper credited with 309 kills—& an advocate for women’s rights. On a US tour in 1942, she found a friend in the first lady.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko arrived in Washington, D.C., in late 1942 as little more than a curiosity to the press, standing awkwardly beside her translator in her Soviet Army uniform. She spoke no English, but her mission was obvious. As a battle-tested and highly decorated lieutenant in the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division, Pavlichenko had come on behalf of the Soviet High Command to drum up American support for a “second front” in Europe. Joseph Stalin desperately wanted the Western Allies to invade the continent, forcing the Germans to divide their forces and relieve some of the pressure on Soviet troops.

She visited with President Franklin Roosevelt, becoming the first Soviet citizen to be welcomed at the White House. Afterward, Eleanor Roosevelt asked the Ukranian-born officer to accompany her on a tour of the country and tell Americans of her experiences as a woman in combat. Pavlichenko was only 25, but she had been wounded four times in battle. She also happened to be the most successful and feared female sniper in history, with 309 confirmed kills to her credit—the majority German soldiers. She readily accepted the first lady’s offer.

She graciously fielded questions from reporters.  One wanted to know if Russian women could wear makeup at the front. Pavlichenko paused; just months before, she’d survived fighting on the front line during the Siege of Sevastopol, where Soviet forces suffered considerable casualties and were forced to surrender after eight months of fighting. “There is no rule against it,” Pavlichenko said, “but who has time to think of her shiny nose when a battle is going on?”

The New York Times dubbed her the “Girl Sniper,” and other newspapers observed that she “wore no lip rouge, or makeup of any kind,” and that “there isn’t much style to her olive-green uniform.”

In New York, she was greeted by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and a representative of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union, C.I.O., who presented her with, as one paper reported, a “full-length raccoon coat of beautifully blended skins, which would be resplendent in an opera setting.” The paper lamented that such a garment would likely “go to the wars on Russia’s bloody steppes when Lyudmila Pavlichenko returns to her homeland.”

But as the tour progressed, Pavlichenko began to bristle at the questions, and her clear, dark eyes found focus. One reporter seemed to criticize the long length of her uniform skirt, implying that it made her look fat. In Boston, another reporter observed that Pavlichenko “attacked her five-course New England breakfast yesterday. American food, she thinks, is O.K.”

Soon, the Soviet sniper had had enough of the press’s sniping. “I wear my uniform with honor,” she told Time magazine. “It has the Order of Lenin on it. It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn.”

Still, Malvina Lindsey, “The Gentler Sex” columnist for the Washington Post, wondered why Pavlichenko couldn’t make more of an effort with regard to her style. “Isn’t it a part of military philosophy that an efficient warrior takes pride in his appearance?” Lindsey wrote.  “Isn’t Joan of Arc always pictured in beautiful and shining armor?”

Slowly, Pavlichenko began to find her voice, holding people spellbound with stories of her youth, the devastating effect of the German invasion on her homeland, and her career in combat. In speeches across America and often before thousands, the woman sniper made the case for a U.S. commitment to fighting the Nazis in Europe. And in doing so, she drove home the point that women were not only capable, but essential to the fight.

“Take away the lash of the boss, and you are suddenly forced to confront service employees as human beings with human emotions, without their company-supplied masks of enforced good cheer”

There’s been a bit of a discussion about affective labor going around. Paul Myerscough in the London Review of Books describes the elaborate code with which the Pret a Manger chain enforces an ersatz cheerfulness and dedication on the part of its employees, who are expected to be “smiling, reacting to each other, happy, engaged.” Echoing a remark of Giraudoux and George Burns, the most important thing to fake is sincerity: “authenticity of being happy is important.”

Tim Noah and Josh Eidelson elaborate on this theme, and Sarah Jaffe makes the point that this has always been an extremely gendered aspect of labor (waged and otherwise). She notes that “women have been fighting for decades to make the point that they don’t do their work for the love of it; they do it because women are expected to do it.” Employers, of course, would prefer equality to be established by imposing the love of work on both genders.

Noah describes the way Pret a Manger keeps “its sales clerks in a state of enforced rapture through policies vaguely reminiscent of the old East German Stasi.” I was reminded of the Soviet model too, but in a different way. I’m just old enough to remember when people talked about the Communist world as a really-existing place rather than a vaguely-defined bogeyman. And one of the mundane tropes that always came up in foreign travelogues from behind the Iron Curtain concerned the notoriously surly service workers, in particular restaurant waiters. A 1977 newspaper headline reads “Soviet Union Takes Hard Look At Surly Waiters, Long Lines.” In a 1984 dispatch in the New York Times, John Burns reports that “faced with inadequate supplies, low salaries and endless lines of customers, many Russians in customer-service jobs lapse into an indifference bordering on contempt.”

One can find numerous explanations of this phenomenon, from the shortcomings of the planned economy to the institutional structure of the Soviet service industry to the vagaries of the Russian soul to the legacy of serfdom. But one factor was clearly that Soviet workers, unlike their American counterparts, were guaranteed jobs, wages, and access to essential needs like housing, education, and health care. The fear that enforces fake happiness among capitalist service workers — culminating in the grotesquery of Pret a Manger — was mostly inoperative in the Soviet Union. As an article in the Moscow Times explains:

During the perestroika era, the American smile was a common reference point when the topic of rude Soviet service was discussed. In an often-quoted exchange that took place on a late-1980s television talk show, one participant said, “In the United States, store employees smile, but everyone knows that the smiles are insincere.” Another answered, “Better to have insincere American smiles than our very sincere Soviet rudeness!”

With the collapse of the USSR and the penetration of Western capital into Russia, employers discovered a workforce that adapted only reluctantly to the norms of capitalist work discipline. A 1990 article in USA Today opens with a description of the travails facing the first Pizza Hut in the Soviet Union:

To open the first Pizza Hut restaurants in the Soviet Union, U.S. managers had to teach Soviet workers how to find the ”you” in U.S.S.R.

”We taught them the concept of customer service,” says Rita Renth, just back from the experience. ”Things that come naturally to employees here we had to teach them to do: -smiling, interacting with customers, eye contact.”

In no time, however, the managers hit on what I’ve described as the third wave form of the work ethic. Rather than appealing to religious salvation or material prosperity, workers are told that they should find their drudgery intrinsically enjoyable:

The five U.S. managers – and colleagues from Pizza Huts in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Australia and other nations – spent 12 to 14 hours a day drilling the Russians on service and food preparation, Pizza Hut style.

As a way of ”motivating them to be excited about what they were doing, we made (tasks) like folding boxes into a contest,” Rae says. ”When they finished, they said they couldn’t believe they would ever have fun at their jobs.”

That feeling, rare in Soviet workplaces, has been noticed. ”A comment made by a lot of customers was that as soon as they walked in, they sensed a feeling of warmth,” Rae says.

It’s the Pret a Manger approach to enforced cheerfulness (which had better be authentic!), combined with gamification, 1990-style. Along the same lines is this blog post from a business school professor, who recounts the experience of the first Russian McDonald’s:

After several days of training about customer service at McDonald’s, a young Soviet teenager asked the McDonald’s trainer a very serious question: “Why do we have to be so nice to the customers? After all, WE have the hamburgers, and they don’t!”

True enough. But while they may have had the hamburgers, with the collapse of Communism they no longer had steady access to the means of payment.

The brusqueness of customer service interactions has typically been interpreted as an indication of Communism’s shortcomings, their low quality understood as a mark of capitalism’s superiority. And it does indicate a contradiction of the Soviet model, which preserved the form of wage labor while removing many of the disciplinary mechanisms — the threat of unemployment, of destitution — that force workers to accept the discipline of the employer or the customers. That contradiction comes to a head in a restaurant where both employees and customers are miserable. As the old saying goes, “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

“Darkness at Noon” (1940) dramatises the Moscow show trials and Stalin’s “Great Purge” of Old Bolsheviks. In his review for the New Statesman, Orwell praised Koestler’s “inner knowledge of totalitarian methods”: “The common people,” argues the Party operative Gletkin, “cannot grasp ‘deviation’ is a crime in itself; therefore crimes of the sort they can understand – murder, train-wrecking and so forth – must be invented.” Many see Rubashov’s confession as a direct influence upon Winston Smith’s.

Orwell used his review as an opportunity to chastise the left-wing press in Britain for their refusal to speak up; a powerful statement made two years after Kingsley Martin refused to publish his despatches from Spain, fearing they would appear critical of Stalin, and therefore socialism: “What was frightening about these trials was not that they happened – for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society – but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.”

Mr Arthur Koestler should know something about prison, for he has spent a respectable proportion of the past four years there. First a long stretch in one of Franco’s fortresses, with the sound of firing squads ringing through the walls twenty or thirty times a day; then a year or so of internment in France; then escape to England, and a fresh internment in Pentonville – from which he has just been unconditionally released, however. In no case, needless to say, has he been accused of any particular crime. Nowadays, over increasing areas of the earth, one is imprisoned not for what one does but for what one is, or, more exactly, for what one is suspected of being. Still, Mr Koestler can congratulate himself on having hitherto fallen only into the hands of amateurs. If England imprisoned him, it at any rate let him out again, and did not force him beforehand to confess to poisoning sheep, committing sabotage on the railways or plotting to assassinate the King.

His present novel, fruit of his own experiences, is a tale of the imprisonment, confession and death of one of the Old Bolsheviks, a composite picture having resemblances to both Bukharin and Trotsky. The events in it follow the normal course. Rubashov, one of the last survivors of the original Central Committee of the Communist Party, is arrested, is charged with incredible crimes, denies everything, is tortured and is shot in the back of the neck. The story ends with a young girl in whose house Rubashov has once lodged wondering whether to denounce her father to the Secret Police as a way of securing a flat for herself and her future husband. Almost its whole interest, however, centres about the intellectual struggle between three men, Rubashov himself and the two GPU officers, Invanov and Gletkin, who are dealing with his case. Ivanov belongs to the same generation as Rubashov himself and is suddenly purged and shot without trial in the middle of the proceedings. Gletkin, however, belongs to the new generation that has grown up since the Revolution, in complete isolation both from the outside world and from the past. He is the “good Party man,” an almost perfect specimen of the human gramophone. Ivanov does not actually believe that Rubashov has committed the preposterous deeds he is charged with. The argument he uses to induce him to confess is that it is a last service required of him by the Party. The common people, he says, cannot grasp that “deviation” is a crime in itself; therefore crimes of the sort that they can understand – murder, train-wrecking and so forth – must be invented. Gletkin uses the same argument, but his attitude is somewhat different. It is never certain whether he believes Rubashov to be guilty or not; or, more exactly, no distinction between guilt and innocence exists in his mind. The only form of criticism that he is able to imagine is murder. As he sees it, anyone capable of thinking a disrespectful thought about Stalin would, as a matter of course, attempt to assassinate him. Therefore, though the attempt at assassination has perhaps not been made, it can be held to have been made; it exists, like the undrawn production to a line. Gletkin’s strength lies in the complete severance from the past, which leaves him not only without pity but without imagination or inconvenient knowledge. On the other hand, it was the weakness of the Old Bolsheviks to have remains Europeans at heart, more akin to the society they overthrew than to the new race of monsters they created.

When Rubashov gives in and confesses, it is not because of the torture – he has suffered worse at the hands of the Nazis without confessing – so much as from complete inner emptiness. “I asked myself,” he says at his trial, almost in Bukharin’s words, “‘For what am I fighting?’” For what, indeed? Any right to protest against torture, secret prisons, organised lying and so forth he has long since forfeited. He recognises that what is now happening is the consequence of his own acts – even feels a sort of admiration for Gletkin, as the kind of subhuman being probably needed to guide the Revolution through its present stage. The Moscow trials were a horrible spectacle, but if one remembered what the history of the Old Bolsheviks had been it was difficult to be sorry for them as individuals. They took the sword, and they perished by the sword, as Stalin presumably will also, unless he should happen to die prematurely, like Lenin.

Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of brilliant literature, it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow “confessions” by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods. What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened – for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society – but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them. Correspondents of Liberal newspapers pronounced themselves “completely satisfied” by the confessions of men who had been dragged into the light after, in some cases, years of solitary confinement; an eminent lawyer even produced a theory that the loss of the right to appeal was a great advantage to the accused! The simultaneous cases in Spain, in which exactly the same accusations were made but no confessions obtained, were sedulously covered up or lied about in the Left-wing press. It was, of course, obvious that the accused in the Russian cases had been tortured or threatened with torture, but the explanation is probably more complex than that. Mr Koestler thinks, like Souvarine, that “for the good of the Party” was probably the final argument; indeed, his book is rather like an expanded pamphlet, Cauchemar en URSS. As a piece of writing it is a notable advance on his earlier work.

4 January 1941

The legislation being pushed by the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church would make it illegal nationwide to provide minors with information that is defined as “propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism.” It includes a ban on holding public events that promote gay rights. St. Petersburg and a number of other Russian cities already have similar laws on their books.

The bill is part of an effort to promote traditional Russian values as opposed to Western liberalism, which the Kremlin and church see as corrupting Russian youth and by extension contributing to a wave of protest against President Vladimir Putin’s rule.

Samburov describes the anti-gay bill as part of a Kremlin crackdown on minorities of any kind - political and religious as well as sexual - designed to divert public attention from growing discontent with Putin’s rule.

The lanky and longhaired Samburov is the founder of the Rainbow Association, which unites gay activists throughout Russia. The gay rights group has joined anti-Putin marches in Moscow over the past year, its rainbow flag waving along with those of other opposition groups.

Other laws that the Kremlin says are intended to protect young Russians have been hastily adopted in recent months, including some that allow banning and blocking web content and print publications that are deemed “extremist” or unfit for young audiences.

Denis Volkov, a sociologist with the Levada Center, an independent pollster, says the anti-gay bill fits the “general logic” of a government intent on limiting various rights.

But in this case, the move has been met mostly with either indifference or open enthusiasm by average Russians. Levada polls conducted last year show that almost two thirds of Russians find homosexuality “morally unacceptable and worth condemning.” About half are against gay rallies and same-sex marriage; almost a third think homosexuality is the result of “a sickness or a psychological trauma,” the Levada surveys show.

Russia’s widespread hostility to homosexuality is shared by the political and religious elite.

Lawmakers have accused gays of decreasing Russia’s already low birth rates and said they should be barred from government jobs, undergo forced medical treatment or be exiled. Orthodox activists criticized U.S. company PepsiCo for using a “gay” rainbow on cartons of its dairy products. An executive with a government-run television network said in a nationally televised talk show that gays should be prohibited from donating blood, sperm and organs for transplants, while after death their hearts should be burned or buried.

How Tolstoy’s obsession with mortality became a teachable moment.

In 1869, just after he finished War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy experienced a profound spiritual crisis as the result of an incident during a journey through the city of Arzamas, which is on the Tyosha River about 250 miles east of Moscow. As he described it in his unfinished story Notes of a Madman (so titled because Tolstoy was convinced his readers would find the tale implausible), a few hours after midnight he awakened “seized by despair, fear and terror such as [he had] never before experienced.” After asking himself what there was to be afraid of, none other than Death himself answered, “I am here.” Tolstoy, confronting the inescapability of his own death, panicked and raged against its power.

That evening stayed with Tolstoy for the rest of his life; he became permanently preoccupied with mortality. Writing his Confessions a decade later, Tolstoy would ask: “Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?” “He engaged in long and laborious meditations”, wrote Tolstoy’s long-suffering wife, Sonya. “Often he said his brain hurt him, some painful process was going on inside it, everything was over for him, it was time for him to die.”

Tolstoy’s “Arzamas Horror”, as the Russian dramatist Maxim Gorky called it, also served as the basis for his masterful novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych. In this slim book, a 45-year-old Russian judge realizes he is dying and acknowledges that he has wasted his life attaining comfort and status. While outwardly appearing successful, Ilych suffers from an unhappy marriage, a meaningless career and a selfish existence. “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible”, reads one typically devastating Tolstoyan line.

Melancholy as this is, the most harrowing parts of the story lie in Ilych’s terror at confronting his own mortality, much as Tolstoy had years earlier in the dark morning hours in Arzamas. Perhaps nowhere else in all of world literature is the sheer horror of the fact of death laid so bare: “He would go to his study, lie down, and again remain alone with it. Face to face with it, and there was nothing to be done with it. Only look at it and go cold.”

(Source: sunrec)

What really happened to Russia’s missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space.

Midnight, 19 May 1961. A crisp frost had descended on Turin’s city centre which was deserted and deathly silent. Well, almost. Two brothers, aged 20 and 23, raced through the grid-like streets (that would later be made famous by the film The Italian Job) in a tiny Fiat 600, which screamed in protest as they bounced across one cobbled piazza after another at top speed. 

The Fiat was loaded with dozens of iron pipes and aluminium sheets which poked out of windows and were strapped to the roof. The car screeched to a halt outside the city’s tallest block of flats. Grabbing their assorted pipes, along with a large toolbox, the two brothers ran up the stairs to the rooftop. Moments later, the city’s silence was rudely broken once more as they set to work: a concerto of hammering, clattering, sawing and shouting. 

Suddenly, an angry voice rang out; the man who lived on the floor below leant out of the window and screamed: “Will you stop that racket, I’m trying to sleep!” 

One of the young men shouted back “Sorry sir; the Soviets have launched a satellite and we’re trying to intercept it!” 

The brothers finished setting up, grabbed their head-sets, twiddled the knobs on their portable receivers, hit the record button and listened… 

“Come in… come in… come in… Listen! Come in! Talk to me! I am hot! I am hot! Come in! What? Forty-five? What? Fifty? Yes. Yes, yes, breathing. Oxygen, oxygen… I am hot. This… isn’t this dangerous?” 
The brothers looked nervously at one another. They only fully understood the Russian later when their sister translated for them, but the desperation in the woman’s voice was clear. 

“Transmission begins now. Forty-one. Yes, I feel hot. I feel hot, it’s all… it’s all hot. I can see a flame! I can see a flame! I can see a flame! Thirty-two… thirty-two. Am I going to crash? Yes, yes I feel hot… I am listening, I feel hot, I will re-enter. I’m hot!” 

The signal went dead. 

There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going. 

It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever. 

The ‘Lost Cosmonauts’ debate has been reawakened thanks to a new investigation into the efforts of two ingenious, radio-mad young Italian brothers who, starting in 1957, hacked into both Russia’s and NASA’s space programmes – so effect­ively that the Russians, it seems, may have wanted them dead. 

In Russia, monster does not scare you.  You scare monster.  Case in point, the shape-shifting Slavic household spirit called the Domovoi, literally “he of the house”  (Belarus “Damavik”; Polish “Domowik”; Russian “Domovoj”; Serbian “Domaći”, Ukranian “Domovyk”; Slovak “Domovik”; Czech “Dědek”), a pleasant addition to home and hearth in a harmonious house, but akin to a fearsome poltergeist when domestic strife dominates, when not properly propitiated,  or in regards to problematic neighbors.  “The domovoi, or house fairies, are a very moodish lot. You must not mention their names after twilight, and if you ill-treat them they will make sleep impossible. If your house is blessed with good domovoi who love you and your children, they will do many things for you — they will take care of the horses, watch over your daughter, see that she gets a good suitor, and will never let you or yours know starvation” (Wright, 1917, p123-124).

One of the most curious and widespread beliefs of the peasants is that every house contains a domovoi or house-spirit. Russian peasants catch glimpses of the domovoi about as often as Americans see ghosts, but they all believe in his existence. The domovoi is described as a little old man, no bigger than a five-year-old boy. Sometimes he is seen wearing a red shirt, with a blue girdle, like a moujik on holidays. At other times he sports a suit of blue. He has a white beard and yellow hair and glowing eyes. Though mostly invisible, the peasants firmly believe that he is always about the premises and busying himself in their affairs. His usual hiding-place is understood to be behind the big brick stove that forms the chief feature of a Russian cottage. When the people are asleep he issues forth and conducts himself amicably or otherwise, according to the humor he happens to be in. The domovoi is mischievous as a monkey, and like that animal is inclined to fly into a passion at very short notice if he is not satisfied with his surroundings and treatment. Many peasant families after eating supper always leave a portion of food on the table for the domovoi, who would otherwise consider himself ill-treated and disturb their sleep by pounding on the table with his fist (Thomas, 1891, p292-293).

The natural form of the Domovoi reportedly ranges from a hirsute, small, long-bearded man to a slightly more ghoulish dwarf-like creature with horns and a tail (likely a late overlay via Eastern Orthodox Christianity that associated common pagan house spirits with devils), but it is believed he can assume the form of the resident family members, their dead ancestors, or family pets.  In theory, every Slavic home has a Domovoi living under its threshold or stove and it is traditionally the home’s guardian, rewarding respect with assistance in chores, providing pre-cognitive warnings of danger to household members, and generally protecting the home, but when angered through poor upkeep of the household, profane language or general neglectful attitudes, the Domovoi becomes an evil spirit, exhibiting poltergeist-like behaviors, and credited with playing nasty tricks, moving and breaking objects,  making all manner of cacophonous sounds, and when left unappeased, can escalate to suffocating people in their beds.

The Domovoi or household demon is that one most commonly to be heard discussed by the peasants at work and at rest, at market and fete, on festival days and the holidays in honour of any official function. ‘What will the Domovoi do to-day?’ is the peasants’ first thought. What can he do? Much. He haunts dwellings and plays disagreeable tricks on unsuspecting housewives and their husbands; but he can also be domesticated and made almost harmless. However, he is none the less feared, and the peasantry often allude to him as ‘ grandfather.’ Peasants, as a rule, tell me that the Domovoi cannot be seen, but those who have been honoured by a private view are looked upon with nothing short of veneration. By these the Domovoi is stated to be in possession of a rasping voice, and to be covered with soft hair, like the down on a baby’s skin, even to the palms of his hands. His principal occupation is to hide in stores, cupboards, boxes, and moan dismally, occasionally asserting himself by sitting on men’s chests while they sleep (Byford, 1914, p46-47).

Scholars have pondered if the origins of the concept of the temple can be found in what has been termed “the Threshold Covenant”.   That is to say that the first sacred space was the home, visible in almost universal traditions of the sanctity of the entrance to the home.  “The primitive altar of the family would seem to have been the threshold, or door-sill, or entrance-way, of the home dwelling place. This is indicated by surviving customs, in the East and elsewhere among primitive peoples, and by the earliest historic records of the human race. It is obvious that houses preceded temples, and that the house-father was the earliest priest. Sacrifices for the family were, therefore, within or at the entrance of the family domicile” (Trumbull, 1896, p.3).  The Domovoi is often reputed to live underneath the threshold of a home or beneath the stove (the symbolic pre-religious altar around which family life revolves).  Coupled with references to Domovoi by the title “Grandfather”, his existence would seem to be a vestige of ancestor worship coupled with the threshold covenant.

If, indeed, the earliest dwelling of man was a cave, rather than a tent, the household fire was still at its entrance; and the threshold was the hearthstone.  When, in the progress of building-changes, the hearthstone was removed to the center of the building, or of the inner court, its sanctity went with it, as the place of the family fire. Thus, for example, in Russia, theDomovoi, or household deity, who is honored and invoked at the threshold, “is supposed to live behind the stove now, but in early times he, or the spirits of the dead ancestors, of whom he is now the chief representative, were held to be in even more direct relations with the fire on the hearth; as were the Penates of the Romans, who were sometimes spoken of as at the threshold, and again as at the hearth (Trumbull, 1896, p.23).

The Soviet Union actively promoted the “disenchantment” of society by rooting out what they termed superstition and religion, ostensibly intent on replacing theology with science, rationality, and philosophical materialism, but the Domovoi  began to metamorphosize prior to the ascendancy of communism in Russia, beginning with its demonization by the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church.  Max Weber’s modern “world robbed of gods” is characterized by “rationalization and intellectualization and, above all by the disenchantment of the world”, but this seems perhaps too much to lay at the doorstep of modernity alone.  Certainly, communist philosophical attitudes towards organized religion rejected it as a rival for the hearts and minds of the proletariat, but rejection of “everyday” paganism preceded this, and one might argue that organized religion has its own version of modernity, and increased intellectualization and rationalization in the form of demonization.  Associating the process of demonization with intellectualization and rationalization may seem counterintuitive, but when you consider orderly and hierarchical Christian demonology in comparison to the relative anarchy of pagan folk beliefs, where a veritable zoo of entities equally benign and malevolent require appeasement, the transfer of both good and evil to respective hierarchies, offers a total dominion over the identification of the sacred vs. the profane.  I would not go so far to call this modernity, but rather a consolidation in the march towards modernity.

Newly-declassified documents show the FBI kept close tabs on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s only daughter after her high-profile defection to the United States in 1967, gathering details from informants about how her arrival was affecting international relations.

The documents were released Monday to The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act following Lana Peters’ death last year at age 85 in a Wisconsin nursing home. Her defection to the West during the Cold War embarrassed the ruling communists and made her a best-selling author. And her move was a public relations coup for the U.S.

One April 28, 1967, memo details a conversation with a confidential source who said the defection would have a “profound effect” for anyone else thinking of trying to leave the Soviet Union. The source claimed to have discussed the defection with a Czechoslovak journalist covering the United Nations and a member of the Czechoslovakia “Mission staff.”

“Our source opined that the United States Government exhibited a high degree of maturity, dignity and understanding during this period,” according to the memo, prominently marked “SECRET” at the top and bottom. “It cannot help but have a profound effect upon anyone who is considering a similar solution to an unsatisfactory life in a Soviet bloc country.”

When she defected, Peters was known as Svetlana Alliluyeva, but she went by Lana Peters following her 1970 marriage to William Wesley Peters, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. Peters said her defection was partly motivated by the Soviet authorities’ poor treatment of her late husband, Brijesh Singh, a prominent figure in the Indian Communist Party.

Another memo dated June 2, 1967, describes a conversation an unnamed FBI source had with Mikhail Trepykhalin, identified as the second secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C.

The source said Trepykhalin told him the Soviets were “very unhappy over her defection” and asked whether the U.S. would use it “for propaganda purposes.” Trepykhalin “was afraid forces in the U.S. would use her to destroy relationships between the USSR and this country,” the source told the FBI.

An unnamed informant in another secret memo from that month said Soviet authorities were not disturbed by the defection because it would “further discredit Stalin’s name and family.”

Stalin, a dictator held responsible for sending millions of his countrymen to their deaths in labor camps, led the Soviet Union from 1941 until his death in 1953. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced him three years later as a brutal despot.

And even though Peters denounced communism and her father’s policies, Stalin’s legacy haunted her in the United States.

“People say, ‘Stalin’s daughter, Stalin’s daughter,’ meaning I’m supposed to walk around with a rifle and shoot the Americans,” she said in a 2007 interview for a documentary about her life. “Or they say, ‘No, she came here. She is an American citizen.’ That means I’m with a bomb against the others. No, I’m neither one. I’m somewhere in between.”