#Russian Railroads

[boardgoats]

Deutscher Spiele Preis - 2022

Deutscher Spiele Preis – 2022

The Deutscher Spiele Preis awards recognise the “Best Children’s Game” and a top ten list of the “Best Family and Adult Games”, the results of an open vote by games clubs, gamers and people in the industry.  They are awarded annually at the Internationale Spieltage in Essen and the winners are announced in advance.  As annual awards, the games named in the Deutscher Spiele Pris lists often…

[russian-aesthetic]

[tanadrin]

One question I had, just sort of an idle curiosity thing, was after the Russian forces withdrew from Ukraine in the northeast, what kept the fighting isolated mostly to the southeast, and what did the rest of the border look like between these two countries that were at war? Just guys with guns staring tensely at each other over the border fence?

Well, it turns out the answer to the first part of that question was “not a lot”!

[ragamuffingunnar]

LIFE Magazine — May 1st, 1939

A Russian engineer and fireman adorned in gasmasks stand on the side of the cab of a locomotive. Pictured also is the railroad's emblem, CCCP lettering, coupled with the hammer and sickle symbology, and North-Caucasus. The painted square ledger holds the crew's names, and denotes that they're part of the Honorary Brigade of the Rostov Depot.

[mockva]

[alexxx-malev]

Russia. LV-0233 steam locomotive at the station "Taganrog-II" Паровоз ЛВ-0233 на станции "Таганрог-II"

[alifethatilove]

Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

"To whom do I owe the biggest apology?" No one's been crueler than I've been to me.

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Alanis Morissette, Under Rug Swept

[usarmytrooper]

[guerrerense]

Batalino Flag Stop por Parker Wilson Por Flickr: L-3958 arrives in the village of Batalino after being flagged by the station master, which is still a regular part of operations on this line. The wooden station at Batalino was completed in 1906 and is a wonderful example of pre-revolutionary Russian railway architecture. To stimulate tourism in this economically depressed part of the country, in fall of 2018 Russian Railways made the decision to operate the regular local passenger train (6697/6698) from Bologoye to Ostashkov with steam power on Saturdays. While the idea behind it is to increase tourism, make no mistake - this a regular passenger train whose primary job is to serve as a local form of transportation. The vast majority of passengers aren't tourists, but little old babushkas just trying to get from village to village with their jars of mushrooms and pickled tomatoes. This is as authentic of an experience as you can get with a steam-hauled passenger train in the 21st century. The train takes three hours to traverse its 70-mile route and travels at speeds of 30-40 mph, making 13 stops in various villages along the way. Unfortunately for railfans, chasing it is extremely difficult, as it weaves through a severely underdeveloped part of the countryside. The dangerous logging roads between villages make for a somewhat frustrating experience in that regard. However; it all adds to the authenticity of the beauty that is provincial Russia.

[anthropologistfromentropy]

WTF, the Yusupov's Moscow palace literally had secret tunnels leading to Kremlin and all over Moscow??

Damn, I accidentally chose the perfect place for an orphanage for the queer kids from the brothel in my fic. It's like it was literally designed to be an Underground Railroad! And imagine how easy they can do attacks, just appear and disapper out of nowhere??

[russianprotesters]

2 reasons you might not be seeing antiwar Russians being active:

They're scared in this environment, where a few words can get you imprisoned for years

They're acting underground-- They're not exactly going to advertise their secret activities, which would mean a harsh reaction from the putin regime.

[un-ionizetheradlab]

Russia just freed SIXTEEN political prisoners in a prisoner swap with the West!

Among the released political prisoners are:

Oleg Orlov, a longtime dissident and the co-chair of Memorial, an organization created in 1989 to chronicle the USSR's human rights abuses and educate Russians about the history of political repression;

Sasha Skochilenko, an LGBTQ artist who was imprisoned in April 2022 for replacing price tags at grocery stores with data about Russian destruction in Ukraine, deemed treasonous under Russia's "fake news" law;

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a political dissident who was fundamental in bringing about the Magnitsky Act to sanction Russian human rights abusers, and who was poisoned twice by the KGB in attempted assassinations before being sentenced to 25 years in prison for "treason";

Evan Gershkovich, a young American journalist who was arrested in Russia while reporting for the Wall Streeet Journal in March 2023 and sentenced to 16 years in prison for "espionage";

Paul Whelan, American former Marine who was arrested in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years of hard labor for "espionage";

Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison for spreading "fake news" about the war in Ukraine;

Andrei Pivovarov, an opposition activist who headed the pro-democracy organization Open Russia before being imprisoned in a Siberian penal colony infamous for its torture of prisoners;

Ilya Yashin, a young opposition politician who was sentenced to 8.5 years in prison for publishing YouTube videos about the war in Ukraine; when Russian authorities "encouraged" him to leave the country, he chose instead to stay;

Lilia Chanysheva, opposition activist and regional coordinator of Navalny HQ; in her final speech before the Russian court, she tried in vain to appeal to the judge's sense of empathy: "If you put me in jail for 12 years, I will be too old to bear a child. Give me a chance to be a mother!";

Kevin Lik, a dual German-Russian citizen who was arrested as a minor for "photographing military sites" shortly before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine; he was the youngest person ever to be convicted of treason in Russia;

Rico Krieger, a German man sentenced to death in Belarus for supposedly planting explosives on a railroad track to help the Ukrainian army;

Dieter Voronin, a dual German-Russian citizen and political scientist who was arrested in 2021 in connection to a treason case involving Russian journalist Ivan Safronov;

Patrick Schobel, a German man arrested in February 2024 at the Pulkovo International Airport in St Petersburg when customs officers found cannabis gummies in his luggage, in a scenario very similar to that of Brittney Griner;

German Moyzhes, a dual German-Russian citizen and lawyer who was charged with treason for helping Russians obtain European residency permits;

Vadim Ostanin, opposition activist and Navalny associate arrested in 2021 for his work with Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation;

Ksenia Fadeyeva, dissident and Navalny associate sentenced to 9 years in prison.

[alexxx-malev]

Russia. Svir River. Railroad bridge Свирь. Железнодорожный мост

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: Shalom Yoran 

Selim Sznycer, aka Shalom Yoran, was a Polish Jew who escaped the mass murder of all the Jews in his town, including his parents, and wanted to fight Nazis. However, when he tried to join a Russian resistance group, they rejected him for being Jewish, which led him to create his own militia of 200 Jews who hid in the forest and carried out acts of sabotage against the Nazi occupiers.

Selim Sznycer was born in Poland in 1925. After the Nazis invaded Warsaw, the Sznycer family fled to a different part of Poland, the town of Kurzeniec, occupied by the Soviets. But in 1941 the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. and despite their best efforts to escape the Nazis, Selim and his family found themselves living under Nazi occupation once again.

The Jews of Kurzeniec were forced into a squalid ghetto. Not far away was a Russian POW camp, where the prisoners were suffering from abuse, starvation and disease. Local Soviet partisans were forming militias to fight the German occupiers, and Selim heard about the nascent resistance movement from an escaped Russian POW.

The day before Yom Kippur in 1942, Nazi high command gave orders to “liquidate” the ghetto – meaning kill all the inhabitants. From a contact in the resistance, Selim learned of the horrific plan, and he and his brother were able to escape from the ghetto and hide in a nearby barn owned by Polish peasant, Ignalia Biruk, who took in the terrified Jewish boys at great risk to herself. From his hiding place, he heard the sounds of all the Jews in the ghetto being massacred, including his own parents. He later remembered his mother’s last words to him, “She told me, ‘Go fight… try to save yourselves, avenge our death and tell the world what happened.’ These are the words that guided me through that dark period, what gave me strength to fight, and what inspires me to share my story today.”

That winter, Selim, his brother and three friends hid in the Polish forest near the Sang river. They survived the brutal cold by building an underground bunker. A few kindly locals periodically gave them some food, but most of their provisions were stolen.

Selim wanted to fight the Nazis who had taken everything from him, and in 1943 he and his small group approached a Russian partisan unit, but they wouldn’t allow the five Jews to join because they had no weapons. Desperate to join the fight, Selim persisted, and finally the unit commander told him that if they returned to Kurzeniec and blew up the Nazi munitions factory, they would be allowed to join the resistance group. The Russians assumed the Jewish boys couldn’t possibly survive the dangerous mission, but they carried out the bombing successfully and returned to the forest, only to be told the real reason they were rejected: they were Jewish.

Undeterred, Selim wandered the forest in nearby Belarus looking for Jews who wanted to fight. He formed an all-Jewish resistance unit featuring 200 fighters. After the Germans were defeated at Stalingrad, Selim and his group harassed and sabotaged the retreating German soldiers. They blew up bridges and railroad supply lines. In 1944, Belarus was liberated by the Soviets, and Selim and the other Jewish resistance fighters went from the firing pan to the fire: they were drafted into the Red Army, where they were viciously persecuted for being Jewish, enduring beatings and near-starvation. Selim managed to escape and flee to Italy, where he illegally fought with the British Army until the war ended in 1945.

Selim used a fake British passport to emigrate to Palestine, then occupied by the British who severely restricted the number of Jews who could enter the territory. Like many Jews, when Selim got to Israel he dropped his Polish name and started using his Hebrew name: Shalom Yoran. He joined the Israeli Army and became a decorated Air Force officer. He built a successful career developing the Israeli aircraft industry. He was a founding member of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and a governor of Tel Aviv university.

In 2003, Selim/Shalom published “The Defiant,” a memoir about his experience as a resistance fighter during the war. He dedicated the book to his parents. Shalom Yoran died in 2013 at age 88, survived by his beloved wife Varda, and their children and grandchildren.

For fighting Nazis and avenging his parents’ deaths, we honor Shalom Yoran as this week’s Thursday Hero.

[mesetacadre]

Aviation in the USSR

A collection of excerpts from Anna Lousie Strong's The Soviets Expected It, compiled for @czerwonykasztelanic

[...] Or the guerrilla detachment which captured six German planes, destroyed five of them, and sent the sixth to the Red Army, piloted by an amateur air enthusiast, who was a tractor driver in ordinary life. Lt. Talalikhin’s initiative is already a Soviet aviator’s tradition. Exhausting his ammunition in a fight with three enemy planes, he rammed the tail of one enemy with his propeller, smashed the tail of another enemy plane with his wing tip, and then bailed out of his own plane safely. Moscow parks displayed the wreckage of the German planes, and other Soviet pilots quickly copied the tactics. An aviation technician, Konikov, won renown by attaching the fuselage of a plane he was repairing to the front platform of a military train whose locomotive had been bombed by the enemy; he thus pulled the most necessary parts of the train to safety.

pg. 14

The Soviet people glimpsed and felt victory. For the first time they began to feel that they were no longer “backward Russians.” They were beginning to challenge the world. With this went a proud sense of their unity as a nation. Cotton growers in Turkestan exulted, “We have conquered the Arctic,” though they themselves would never see the snow. Bearded peasants, who had never sat in an airplane, began to talk about “our conquest of the air.” Young Nina Kameneva expressed the mood of the country’s young people when she broke a world’s altitude record in parachute jumping and remarked on landing: “The sky of our country is the highest sky in the world.”

pg. 46

Moscow can make all the implements of war, including planes and motor trucks, inside the city. [...] Moscow’s sky is covered by an air defense that was the marvel of the London experts who visited it after the war began to make suggestions and found it far superior to London’s. Anti-aircraft shells make a thick blanket at four distinct levels to London’s one, and observation planes patrol the heavens night and day. Moscow’s four million people also offer a night-and-day defense.

pg. 51

Alma Ata, the capital of this area, has grown from a town of 60,000 to a proud young city of 260,000 in the ten years since the railroad reached it. Its life has leaped at once from the nomad epoch to the airplane. The railroad is too slow to tame the wastes of Kazakstan. From Alma Ata Airport the planes shoot forth, east, west, south, north, on new discoveries. [...] Kazakstan is only one of the energetic regions behind the Urals. South of it lie the lands of the Uzbeks and Tadjiks, where some of the largest textile mills of the U.S.S.R. work up the locally grown cotton and where automobile and airplane parts are produced by mass production in the historic city of Samarkand.

pg. 58

I have traveled many times on the Trans-Siberian. In the spring of 1935, I went from Vladivostok to Moscow with a stop-over in the Jewish autonomous territory whose capital is Birobidjan. The train was crowded with pioneering people in warm woolen clothes and padded leather jackets, engineers, Army men, developers of the Far East. [...] An army engineer who shared my table at dinner was celebrating his return by airplane from the northern wilderness by consuming a whole bottle of port and bragging about the Far Eastern pioneers.

pg. 59

According to Pierre Cot, the French Air Minister, who visited Moscow in 1933, the Soviet air arm was at least equal to the best in Europe in numbers, technical equipment, and, above all, in the productive capacity of the aviation industry.‡ Thus, by the end of 1932, which ended the first Five Year Plan, the Soviet Union had reached the level of Western Europe in armaments – a fairly modest level judged by standards of later years.

pg. 65

Other official indications of the extent of the Red Army’s mechanization come from Voroshilov’s report in 1934 [...]. Five years later [...]. He claimed that the “bomb salvo” of the Soviet air force (the number of bombs that can be dropped by all planes at once) had tripled in five years and had reached more than 6,000 tons.

pg. 66

Soviet airplane pilots also hold many world records, both in altitude and long-distance flights. Their conquest of the Arctic and its difficult weather has accustomed them to the severest conditions. Americans well remember the Soviet pilots who twice made world records by flying from Moscow to America. These were individual exploits, but the development of Arctic aviation on which they were based was the work of large numbers of pilots and implies a whole air tradition

pg. 67

Parachute jumping has become a national sport in the Soviet Union. Soviet people are probably the most air-minded people in the world. Training for air-mindedness begins in the kindergarten. Small tots play the “butterfly game” and jump around with large butterflies pinned on their hair, gaining the idea that flying is fun and a natural activity. Children in their teens make jumps from “parachute towers” which are far rougher and more realistic than the parachute tower in the New York World’s Fair, which was copied from them. The sport is popular not only in the cities but on the farms. Several years ago a Ukrainian farmer told me of his trip to the nearby city with a group of farm children, all of whom immediately formed in line in the recreation park to go up in a tall tower and jump off under a parachute. “I thought it very terrifying,” he said, “and wondered why the park authorities allowed it. Then I saw that my own thirteen-year-old daughter was at the head of the line. These children of today aren’t afraid of anything.” At an older age, Soviet young people jump from airplanes, learn to operate gliders, or even become amateur pilots in their spare time. Every large factory, government department, and many of the larger collective farms have “aviation clubs,” which are given free instruction by the government. Probably a million people in the Soviet Union have made actual jumps from parachutes. It is not surprising that the Red Army was the first to use parachute troops in active service several years before the Germans adopted them. In 1931 a small detachment of parachutists surrounded and cleaned up a bandit gang in Central Asia. The making of airplane models by young people is taken seriously in the U.S.S.R. In 1937 over a million school children were spending after-school hours in aviation model stations. At a later stage, young people of talent create real airplanes and demonstrate them at Tushino aviation exhibitions. Owing to the wide interest in aviation and the public ownership of factories, a bright Soviet youth who invents a new type of airplane may get it constructed by his factory sports club and show it off. At one of the aviation festivals I attended, I saw a score of different amateur planes, including every possible shape of flying object – short, stubby ones, long thin ones, others shaped like different kinds of insects. They added greatly to the gaiety of the occasion. Whether or not they produced any really valuable new invention, they at least encouraged the inventiveness of their makers.

pg. 72

In the past two years, especially, all this training has been given a very realistic turn. [...] Only a month before the Germans attacked the Soviet borders, 7,000 Moscow citizens practiced a special drill in repulsing parachute troops over the week end. The large numbers of such trained citizenry, both among recruits entering the Red Army and among the older citizens assisting it, greatly add to the Soviet Union’s total defense.

pg. 73