Tag: Soviet Union

December 11, 1969: The Naked Cold War

Posted on by Richard Daybell

Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were generally confrontational through most of the second half of the last century.  In the United States, Communist plots were everywhere, and the Soviet Union blamed American capitalists for most of the ills of the world. On December 11, 1969, a noted Russian author lashed out against western decadence in one of the more unusual cold war recriminations.

On December 11, 1969, Sergei Mikhailkov, secretary of the Moscow writer’s union, known for his books for children, weighed in against the production of “Oh! Calcutta!” that was currently an off-Broadway hit. Performers in their “birthday suits,” he fumed, were proof of the decadence and “bourgeois” thinking in Western culture.  American nudity was an assault on Soviet innocence.

Oddly enough, those Americans throughout the Midwest who didn’t think the play was about India were convinced it was a Communist plot.

More disturbing, Mikhailkov raged on, was the fact that this American abomination was affecting Russian youth. These vulgar exhibitions were “a general striptease that is one of the slogans of modern bourgeois art.” Soviet teens were more familiar with “the theater of the absurd and the novel without a hero and all kinds of modern bourgeois reactionary tendencies in the literature and art of the West” than with “the past and present of the literature of their fatherland.”

Mikhailkov’s outburst came at the end of a conference of Russian intellectuals, who applauded his remarks without visible enthusiasm before returning to their clandestine copies of Fanny Hill.

January 31, 1696: Gobsmacked by a Dutch Undertaker

Posted on by Richard Daybell

One would not think of undertakers as having particularly fiery dispositions.  Especially Dutch undertakers. They’d probably look at a current corpse  and realize they had it better than that poor bloke.  The most you might expect would be a mild oath such as “Go stick your finger in a dike.”  Thus it comes as a surprise that Dutch undertakers rose up in revolt on January 31, 1696.  On that day, they rioted in the streets 0f Amsterdam.

The cause of their dudgeon was a death tax, a tax on the burial of people, and since the person being buried would not be paying the tax, the undertakers got stiffed.  Not only that, the Amsterdam City Council reduced the number of official undertakers allowed from 300 to 72.  (They also reduced the number of political commentators to 1, but no one seemed to care.) The petulant undertakers stormed right up to the house of the Mayor of Amsterdam.  Someone in the crowd (most likely an undercover government operative) shouted “We’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow your house down.”  Which they did.  And they carried off the Mayor and tossed him into the Zuider Zee, wooden shoes and all.  Sailors and Dutch Uncles joined the revolt which moved on to the houses of the City Captain, Burgomasters and other city elite who also received their comeuppance.

Then as quickly as it had started, the riot ended.  Some say the undertaker’s hearts grew three sizes that day; others say it was cocktail time.  Nevertheless the Aansprekersoproer (that’s the official title of the event) ended, and shortly afterward the death tax was repealed.

 

Glasnost on a Sesame Seed Bun

Muscovites lined up on January 31, 1990, to try a most unRussian guilty pleasure. The Soviet Union might be crumbling around them, but that icon of Western decadence was riding high. McDonald’s had come to town.

Those Big Macs, with fries and shakes might cost a day’s wages, but the people of Moscow were eating them up. The notorious golden arches of capitalism were signs that times they were a’changing in the Soviet Union – in fact, within two years the Soviet Union would dissolve. A Soviet journalist saw no great political earthquake but rather an “expression of pragmatism toward food.” Could the Quarter Pounder be the ultimate example of the People’s Food?

Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Located in Pushkin Square, this McDonald’s was the world’s largest, boasting 28 cash registers and a seating capacity of 700. Its opening day broke a McDonald’s record with more than 30,000 customers served.

Moscow resident Natalya Kolesknikova told Russian State Television that when out-of-town guests came to visit, she showed them two things, McDonald’s and the McKremlin.

In 2022, there were 850 McDonald’s in Russia. Then Russia invaded Ukraine.  And McDonald’s is pulling out of a market it’s been a part of for 32 years, “de-arching” and selling every one of its restaurants.

 

December 11, 1969: The Naked Cold War

Posted on by Richard Daybell

Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were generally confrontational through most of the second half of the last century.  In the United States, Communist plots were everywhere, and the Soviet Union blamed American capitalists for most of the ills of the world. On December 11, 1969, a noted Russian author lashed out against western decadence in one of the more unusual cold war recriminations.

On December 11, 1969, Sergei Mikhailkov, secretary of the Moscow writer’s union, known for his books for children, weighed in against the production of “Oh! Calcutta!” that was currently an off-Broadway hit. Performers in their “birthday suits,” he fumed, were proof of the decadence and “bourgeois” thinking in Western culture.  American nudity was an assault on Soviet innocence.

Oddly enough, those Americans throughout the Midwest who didn’t think the play was about India were convinced it was a Communist plot.

More disturbing, Mikhailkov raged on, was the fact that this American abomination was affecting Russian youth. These vulgar exhibitions were “a general striptease that is one of the slogans of modern bourgeois art.” Soviet teens were more familiar with “the theater of the absurd and the novel without a hero and all kinds of modern bourgeois reactionary tendencies in the literature and art of the West” than with “the past and present of the literature of their fatherland.”

Mikhailkov’s outburst came at the end of a conference of Russian intellectuals, who applauded his remarks without visible enthusiasm before returning to their clandestine copies of Fanny Hill.