#soviet bloc

An expect from KAGANOVICH SPEAKS 'WE ARE NOT MONSTERS' one of Lazar's last interviews taken from the archives of La Repubblica, the interview was conducted via written questions with answers recorded by tape and published in 1990 a year before Kaganovich would pass of natural causes at 97, 5 months before the dissolving of the USSR

Q: You were a great propagandist and leader. If you could address Soviet citizens, what would you say today?

A: I would tell them to continue fighting the battle for communism, for the ideas of Marx and Lenin. I would say that we are facing the resurgence of nationalism and chauvinism. Ah, of course, if I had an audience like the ones I was used to since I was a boy... When I was sixteen, I once organized a meeting of young workers on the problem of literacy and school education. I had more culture than them, I was a learned young man. But they understood me. You have to know how to talk to young people. And today's youth seems to me to be at a much lower level than the workers I spoke to in 1913. They are a youth ready to be dragged along by anyone. With them we should start again from the beginning, from the ABC.... Yet there is a great debate in society, young people are active in movements of all kinds, they talk about everything... Yes, they discuss, but about what? When I read the petty interviews of certain former members of the Politburo, or certain memoirs... They tell the story like this: I went, he came, he said, I said... But what does that mean? What does it mean? We need to talk about ideas. Of ideas! Of substance! Of content! Instead, what are our so-called public movements talking about today? There are at least fifty of them, and fewer than fifteen parties never participate in the various elections. And they all only create confusion in the minds of young people. If I had to speak, first of all I would distinguish. You have to address old managers in one way, middle managers in another way, petty bourgeois and philistines in yet another way... and then you have to address the enemy in a different way, you talk to the enemy as he deserves. And that's where I would start. I would say: be careful, comrades, they are attacking us! Bourgeois ideology is on the attack, and it must be recognized that it has won many battles at this moment. What is happening in Poland? And in Hungary? We are retreating! And what is happening in Poland and Hungary is the premise of what can happen here too. It's something that makes me sick. It makes me cry. Why has my health gotten worse? Because it worries me when I see what is happening in Eastern Europe, in Germany.

Lazar M. Kaganovich

THE DREAD LORD OF PLANET APOKOLIPS MAKES A GUEST APPEARANCE IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY.

PIC INFO: Resolution at 1492x2400 -- Spotlight on a Russian "STAR WARS" (1977) movie poster, finally released theatrically in the Soviet Union in 1990. Artwork by Yuri Bokser. 41 x 25½ in. (104 x 65 cm.).

OVERVIEW: "One of the first big premieres of Western cinema in the Soviet Union, "STAR WARS" was finally released in the former USSR in the summer of 1990. One of four rare and collectable official posters designed by Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev to celebrate the premiere, this unique interpretation sees Jabba the Hutt's monumental head juxtaposed symmetrically against the looming Death Star in a burst of Light Speed. American publicity materials were strictly banned in the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War, allowing the artists to operate with total creative freedom from the demands of the big Hollywood studios, resulting in quirky and sometimes bizarre interpretations that often made little reference to the film."

-- ROCK PAPER FILM [Vintage Music and Movie Posters]

Meanwhile in tankie clownland The reality of a butcher's shop with typically empty shelves in communist Poland circa 1982 vs the delusional clown world of mindless 21st century tankies living comfortable lives in western capitalist countries. A 1980s joke from the Polish People's Republic….

A man walks into a shop and sees the shelves are empty.

He says: "Oh, so you have no meat?"

I am of that age (Generation X aka The Haunted Generation) whereby a significant part of my childhood was enveloped in the Cold War fears of an impending nuclear apocalypse. A terror adequately catered for by the less than a handful of terrestrial channels emitting their cathode rays into British living rooms. Dystopian dramas such as Threads, When the Wind Blows, the eventual broadcast of the…