Lenin cat

February 26th, 2012

Lenin cat was a meme which emerged in mid-2011 based on an image macro of a cat. A cat that looks like Lenin. Aaand… that’s it.

Lenin cat

Lenin cat

Lenin cat

Plenty more here, here and here.

Lenin cat is pretty absurd, but then, that’s the internet. For cat absurdity of a more real-life sort, take a look at the Wikipedia entry for Operation Acoustic Kitty (no, really), a CIA project from the mid-1960s, which planned to use cats to spy on the Kremlin. It cost twenty million dollars, achieved nothing, and its first mission had to be abandoned when a cat with a spy antenna in its tail was hit and killed by a taxi.

This Ain’t California

February 12th, 2012

Fancy helping to fund a film about skateboarding in East Germany in the 1980s? This Ain’t California is a forthcoming film by Marten Persiel about the skater subculture of the DDR in the run-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s scheduled for release this summer, but they need money to make it happen.

The filmmakers are hoping to raise €50,000 to get the film finished – €10 will get you a ticket to the premiere.

Silviculture propaganda: Soviet forest signs

November 7th, 2011

One of the stranger manifestations of Soviet messaging in the 1950s and 1960s was the use of silviculture propaganda: giant signs created in fields and forests by carefully-planted plots of trees. Back in the mid-20th century, these were presumably thought of as tokens to be seen by future generations from communist spaceships above the earth.

The content of the messages were fairly simple, but they are still visible today. And through Google Maps, anyone can now see them, even decades after their aspirational creation.

Click the images to view them larger, or click the titles to view on Google Maps (smaller embedded maps are below each image — zoom in to get more detail).

Lenin 100 Years

Lenin – 100 Years

USSR 50

USSR 50

USSR 50

USSR 50

USSR 50

USSR 50

Lenin

Lenin

60 Years USSR

60 Years USSR

Lenin 100 Years

Lenin 100 Years

The Estonian empire (work in progress)

May 15th, 2011

From a 2004 report about Estonia’s inventive requests for compensation for damages from Soviet occupation:

“Russia was no doubt particularly perturbed by Salo’s suggestion that it compensate Estonia some $104 billion in damages for the war and occupation, and that the best way to repay would be to hand over an entire Russian region such as Novosibirsk Oblast.”

It’d make for some interesting maps.

Facebook and Europe’s hidden borders

February 27th, 2011

In December 2010, Paul Butler, an intern at Facebook, released a visualisation of connections between friends on Facebook around the world.

It was a revealing glance global interactions, and it garnered a lot of attention.

[The high-resolution version of the image is available here.]

Facebook global visualisation

One of the aspects of the visualisation — noted in passing, if at all, at the time — was the influence of European and Cold War history on the contours of the map. Although it was obvious that Russia and China were ‘missing’, subtler differences were also visible (though you might need to squint a bit to see them).

For example, the Inner German border, the former border between East and West Germany, was replicated in the Facebook data. Apart from a bright patch corresponding to Berlin, most of the former GDR is noticeably less enthusiastic about Facebook than their western counterparts.

Facebook and the former East Germany

In contrast, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are very clearly represented in the map; it seems that, in vague keeping with the western stance of the post-soviet Baltic states, they have a clear preference for Zuckerberg’s colossus.

Facebook and the Baltic States

And Serbia, the traditional Russian balkan ally, is also a relative dark patch compared to its neighbours.

Facebook and Serbia

Most obviously, however, the ‘missing’ Russian area actually corresponds more accurately with the borders of the late USSR than with the existing Russian Federation. Facebook essentially stops dead at the borders of Belarus and Ukraine, and doesn’t reappear until we get to South Korea and Japan. Russians, and other post-soviet social networkers, generally use VKontakte and Odnoklassniki to keep in touch (much like how Chinese users flock to RenRen and 51.com), and this is much of the reason for the ‘dark continent’ of Facebook’s visualisation:

Facebook and the former USSR

There are many more political and cultural divides illustrated by the information in this map — let us know if you see any good ones. It’s just a pity that Facebook hasn’t released a higher-resolution version of the image!