Monthly Archives: December 2022

Happy New Year from the USSR! Postcards of the Bygone Era

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With the New Year coming up, it is time to look hopefully into the coming year and to send someone you love a post card with the best wishes. For me, few modern cards come close to the personality and warmth eminating from the vintage cards. In my family’s archive there are a number of such cards, that were collected by my grandparents from the time even before my mother was born.

Inspired by the article 15 nostalgic Soviet New Year postcards in Russia Beyond the Headlines and by a Telegram post showing how “In the city of Sovetsky, bus stops were decorated with drawings from old Soviet postcards.”, I started scanning this festive part of the collection.

Each postcard is represented with both the face and reverse sides, in the original, aged, paper colour and with the white balance restored (see the links under each picture for the additional versions). The cards are indexed by the year they were approved from printing, meaning that they were used to congratulate people with the next, coming, year.

1952-1953

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Bahmut or Artyomovsk? A historical look at the name of the city

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The battles for Bahmut/Artyomovsk have been raging for some time, the city becoming the focal point of defence the the Ukrainians were building up over the last 8 years, while hiding under the fig leaf of the Minsk peace accord. The Western/Ukrainian publications stick to the name Bahmut as a true “Ukrainian” one. (Incidentally, the name Bahmut has a Turkic sound to it.) The Russian side sticks with Artyomovsk. The article that I am going to translate below looks at the history of the name, and may be an eye-opened for both parties.

And so, the article in question, published in Deita.ru on the 26th of December 2022. Note that the names may alternatively be transliterated as Bakhmut and Artyomovsk.

Bahmut or Artyomovsk? What is wrong with the city’s name?

The conflict in Ukraine is being fought not only on the battlefield – with artillery and missiles, but also in the information space, where symbolism becomes the main weapon. The city of Bahmut, where fierce battles continue, has become a mini-field of a global information and semantic struggle. The Ukrainian modern name of the city is Bahmut, while Russian media and bloggers persistently use the Soviet toponym Artyomovsk.

This material of IA DEITA.RU is about where both names of the city came from, why the heated argument, and what is the problem with the position of our information attack.

Bahmut vs Artyomovsk

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An Honest Deal. How Peter I Bought the Baltic Territories from Sweden. With a bonus about an earlier purchase of Kiev.

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Seeing how the Baltic states (and Ukraine) jumped on the anti-Russian bandwagon, it is worth taking a historical detour into the not so distant past and take a look at a certain fact that those states are trying to erase…

First is a translation of an article from a St.Petersburg edition of “Argumenty i Fakty”, followed by fragment of a related historical article, and concluding with an even deeper dive to the time of the purchase of Kiev from Poland. What is common for these two cases is the fact, that Russia chose to buy the territories at a fair price, despite it having a position of a war winner, enabling it to “just take” those lands. Another aspect of that history is, well, a historical parallel that no one among the Western leadership wants to learn from, maybe because they have not studied history at school.

A fair deal. How Peter I bought the Baltic States from Sweden

Weekly magazine “Arguments and Facts” No. 35. Arguments and facts – Petersburg 31/08/2022


Peter the Great announces the Peace of Nystad (Nishtadt) on Trinity Square in St. Petersburg

The destruction of the monuments to the Soviet soldiers in the Baltic states drew the attention of the Russian society, and at the same time reminded of how these territories came to be a part of the Russian state.

The Northern Russian-Swedish War was concluded on September 10, 1721 with the signing of the Peace of Nystad (Nishtadt), as a result of which Peter the Great actually bought Livonia and Estlandia (modern Latvia and Estonia) from the Swedish Kingdom. Why did the tsar still decide to pay for the territories that were by that time already under the control of the Russian army?

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“Fainting Piglet”, aka. “Unconscious Piggy” Satirical Cartoons Explain the Core of Ukraine and Why SMO Was Unavoidable (with future updates)

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In the August of 2022 the CGI animator Evgenia from Krasnodar Krai started creating something that grew into an in-depth satirical reviews of all what was failing Ukraine, and explaining the Special Military Operation’s goals.

The character personifying Ukraine became a little wayward, Nazi-tainted piglet. The Russian title of the series is “Свинка в обмороке” (Svinka v obmoroke), which is a play on the shortened name of the Special Military Operation (SMO) – SVO in Russian. In English the series have got several varying names, trying to convey the essence: “Unconscious Piggy”, “Fainting Piglet”, “Piglet in a Swoon”, “Swooning Pig”.

All episodes are released at the official Telegram channel of the Fainting Piglet. Evgenia writes in the description: “The Piglet is not the whole of Ukraine, but only her demented part!” I have additionally uploaded them to Yandex Disk for easy download.

Jump to the newly-added episode(s)

While the later episodes were released bilingually, earlier episodes require translation (and most of them also require some context for the Western audience, who have been subjected to the heavy Mains Stream Media censorship). This honourable task was undertaken by the admin of The Putinger’s Cat Telegram channel.

As more and more episodes get release and translated, they are becoming increasingly more difficult to trace. And, additionally, not everyone has Telegram. That is why I decided to upload them to Odysee and create this collated post that will get updates as new episodes see the light of day.

But first, a very short clip that cuts to the chase, and shows the very essence of the conflict and the role Ukraine plays in it!

The very first Unconscious Pig episode – “What is Russia Punishing Ukraine For?” or “Why do Russians support the SMO?” – is finally translated! (Translation at Putinger’s Cat)

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The West Seeing Russia’s Strength as Weakness. A Testimonial on Telegram

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Today I observed a conversation in Putinger’s Cat Telegram channel chat that revolved about Russia and USSR and the Westerner’s view of Russia being weak, countered by a very good string of arguments by Milana Attison. The topic resonated strongly with what I’ve written earlier in this blog in the following articles about the Wild ’90s:

There were several lines of conversation going at once, but in reality they all boiled down to one thing: countering the centuries-old Western stereotype of bad USSR/Russia.

At first Milana replied to a member Jason, who postulated that everything was miserable in the USSR, based on some second-hand information, yet he did not make a distinction between the pre-War USSR or Russia after the 90’s.

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