Volksstimme

June 5th, 2011

Germany has a strong socialist and social-democratic heritage and tradition. The main German social-democratic party, the SPD, is one of the oldest in the world, and its history mirrors much of the grim history of Europe in the twentieth century. East Germany, after its foundation in 1949, was built in part on a doublethink of simultaneously recognising and denying this heritage of preexisting worker’s movements.

One of the familiar tactics of the GDR’s ruling party, the SED (itself a product of a forced marriage between the east german communist and social-democratic parties) was to assume control of existing worker’s institutions and other popular social institutions and transform them into loyal stalinist organisations. This happened to trade unions, professional organisations, church-related groups, youth organisations and more, but one of the most obvious places where this change took place — obvious because of the very nature of the institutions being transformed — was with newspapers. Overnight, previously social-democratic media became party mouthpieces, giving the official line and standing loyally by the SED leadership.

Volksstimme is one example of this phenomenon. This paper, founded in 1890 in Magdeburg, was social-democratic in outlook and became the main daily newspaper of the Saxony-Anhalt region in the early twentieth century. After being banned by the Nazis in 1933, it did not publish again until 1947, when it emerged as a proxy of the SED. Their front page from December 1st, 1979, looked like this:

Volksstimme

The status of the paper as the voice of officialdom is captured in the masthead’s perfunctory slogan, “Organ der Bezirksleitung Magdeburg der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands” — “Organ of the Magdeburg leadership of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany”. It seems to have been a pretty dreary read, as many eastern-bloc papers of the era were. However, historical hindsight sheds some light on some of the editorial choices.

It leads on a story about George McGovern, the US senator regarded — then and now — as a left-liberal democrat, objecting to the stationing of NATO missiles in western Europe. At the dawn of the Reagan era, this seems to have been an attempt by the Volksstimme editors to praise their enemy’s enemies.

The other stories range from similarly ‘ideological’ stories (‘Meeting of the Supreme Soviet ends’, ‘Communist delegation from the Netherlands’) to more mundane fare (‘Japanese rail-speed record of 304 km/h’).

Volksstimme went through another fundamental change of direction after the Wende, when it was bought by the Bauer Media Group and relaunched as a mid-market regional tabloid. It still exists today as one of Saxony-Anhalt’s main regional papers (with numerous local editions) and if you feel like it, you can talk to their staff on Twitter right now.

Urban guerrilla graphic design

May 29th, 2011

Logo and insignia designs of European violent left-wing groups of the mid- to late-20th century. Five-pointed stars seem to have been mandatory.

Rote Armee Fraktion

Rote Armee Fraktion (aka the Baader-Meinhoff Gruppe, Germany, 1970-1998). Features a stylised Heckler & Koch MP5 machine gun.

Revolutionäre Zellen

Revolutionäre Zellen (Germany, 1973-1993). Curious typography.

PRP-BR

Partido Revolucionário do Proletariado -Brigadas Revolucionárias (PRP-BR, Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat – Revolutionary Brigades, Portugal, 1970-2002). The only ones without a five-pointed star.

GRAPO

Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octubre (GRAPO, First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups, Spain, 1975-2007). Nice colour scheme.

FP-25

Forças Populares 25 de Abril (FP-25, Popular Forces 25 April, Portugal, 1980-1987). Diagonal design similar to the flags of Tanzania and Namibia.

DHKP

Devrimci Halk Kurtuluş Partisi-Cephesi (DHKP/C, Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, Turkey, 1978-present).

CCC

Cellules Communistes Combattantes (CCC, Communist Combatant Cells, Belgium, 1984-1986).

Brigate Rosse

Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades, Italy, 1967-1988). This insignia appears to be a digitised version of the banner that was shown in the famous photograph of Aldo Moro taken during his kidnapping and murder in 1978.

Action Directe

Action directe (Direct Action, France, 1979-1987).

November 17

Epanastatiki Organosi dekaefta Noemvri (17 N, Revolutionary Organization 17 November, Greece, 1975-2002). Similar to the flag of Vietnam.

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.

Goodbye Lenin

May 8th, 2011

The question of what to do with Lenin’s body is still something that can arouse impassioned debate in contemporary Russia. One indication of the depth of feeling involved is that the dominant political party, the Putin/Medvedev-aligned United Russia, has no definite policy on the question.

Rather, in a strange combination of historical reckoning and modern political campaigning, they have sought to turn the question into a carefully-curated online debate (complete with instant polling, Twitter feeds and Facebook link-sharing buttons) at GoodbyeLenin.ru.

There is an initial irony in the use of the title of a German film with an English name as the domain name for a website run by Russian nationalists about an ardently internationalist revolutionary. The site itself, however, keeps it simple. “Do you support the idea of burying the body of V.I. Lenin?” it asks, below the bear-and-flag logo of United Russia and a quote from party bigwig Vladimir Medina. Once you submit your vote, you can take a look at the results to date. At the moment, by a roughly-two-to-one ratio, the internet wants Lenin to be buried. If you feel like it, you can add your vote, too.

GoodbyeLenin.ru

Karl-Marx Shop

April 27th, 2011

On first glance, it might seem to a casual passer-by that the Karl-Marx Shop, in Neukölln, Berlin, is some kind of Ostalgie-related attempt to sell mugs and t-shirts to tourists. However, it’s actually a normal household and kitchen supplies shop, and it gets its name from the street it’s on: Karl-Marx-Strasse.

Karl-Marx-Shop

Karl-Marx-Strasse

Streets named after Marx were familiar sights in East Germany during its forty-year existence, but this street is in what was formerly West Berlin, and so the name is somewhat more surprising. The street was given its current name in July 1947 — after the end of World War II in 1945, but prior to the establishment of East Germany in 1949.

Part of the logic of political life in divided Berlin was that East and West would attempt to outdo each other, not only in grand projects like the Haus der Kulturen der Welt or the Fernsehturm Berlin, but also in superficial gestures of supposed friendship and magnanimity. Therefore, from the perspective of the West Berlin political and diplomatic class, it made sense to keep a street named after Marx, as an implied token of willingness to rise above pettiness and acknowledge a hero of the ‘other side’ (this logic was often followed by the East Berlin authorities as well, though they mostly stuck to general themes of peace and friendship, rather than specific historical personages).

The historical ironies are compounded, however, by the reasons for the naming of Berlin’s other Marx-monikered boulevard, Karl-Marx-Allee in Friedrichshain, in former East Berlin. This street — planned, designed and built by the new East German state as a colossal symbol of communist power — was initially named Stalinallee, but was renamed in 1961 as a result of De-Stalinization.

Marx himself might well have been baffled by the appropriation of his memory as an ideological tool for competing social systems, but would surely have relished the irony of a local shop, a basic unit of bourgeois capitalism, using his name.

1987 and 2011

April 3rd, 2011

Mikhail Gorbachev, May 29th, 1987 (Centre, accompanied by Gustáv Husák, Todor Zhivkov, Erich Honecker, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Wojciech Jaruzelski and János Kádár, at the 1987 Warsaw Pact convention closing ceremonies in East Berlin; Photo: Rainer Mittelstädt/German federal archives):

Gorbachev, 1987

Mikhail Gorbachev, March 29th, 2011 (introduced by Kevin Spacey and Sharon Stone at celebrations for his eightieth birthday, and for the Mikhail Gorbachev Award and gala concert for ‘The Man Who Changed The World’, at the Royal Albert Hall, London; Photos: Adrian Dennis, Dave Hogan — see the full set here):

Gorbachev, 1987

The ongoing adventures of the Russian national anthem

March 20th, 2011

Sergey Mikhalkov, a Russian children’s book writer who died in 2009, had an unusual claim to fame — he rewrote his own national anthem three times. His strange experience is part of the slightly schizophrenic story of the Russian and Soviet national anthems in the twentieth century.

At the beginning of 1917, Tsar Nicholas II was enthroned as Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, and the ponderous God Save The Tsar! was the national anthem of the empire, as it had been since the 1830s:

By the end of the same  year (after a brief detour through the provisional government’s Worker’s Marseillaise) Lenin decreed that the Internationale would be the anthem of the new Bolshevik state (with the revolutionary lyrics tellingly changed from future to present tense):

And so it remained, until 1943. It was then that Stalin decided that a brand new anthem was required to inspire victory over Hitler, and so, taking the preexisting anthem of the communist party, he ordered the twenty-nine-year-old Mikhalkov (together with poet Gabriel El-Registan) to write new lyrics, literally overnight. The next day, Stalin made a few revisions to their words and declared himself happy (as well he might, seeing as the new lyrics exclaimed in part that “Stalin has taught us faith in the people, to labour, and inspired us to great feats”), and it became the official national anthem of the USSR on March 15th, 1944.

An English version of the anthem was also famously recorded by Paul Robeson, the black American singer and civil-rights activist:

As a result of the process of De-Stalinization that followed his death in 1953, the references to Stalin in the lyrics of the national anthem were now seen as a troublesome inconvenience, and so the heads of the communist party were caught in a familiar bind — how to deal with an embarrassing situation without having to admit having made any mistakes. Their solution was crude but effective: from 1955 onwards, all the lyrics were simply removed from the anthem, and from then until 1977, the piece was performed as an instrumental.

The soviet leaders finally got around to updating the national anthem in 1977, to coincide with the new constitution, and they decided to go back to Mikhalkov for the lyrics. For this, his second version of the anthem, he altered his earlier words to remove the mentions of Stalin and World War II, added in a couple of mentions of red banners and unbreakable unions, and had the whole thing ready in time for the 1978 Winter Olympics. This version of the anthem remained in use until 1991.

The early years after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 were an unclear and fearful time for most Russians, so it is perhaps unsurprising that Boris Yeltsin ditched the soviet grandiloquence and plumped for another instrumental as the anthem of the new Russian Federation. Patrioticheskaya Pesnya (The Patriotic Song) was a piece that dated originally from the 1830s, and remained the anthem in instrumental form until 1999 (when, briefly, words were added by the poet Viktor Radugin).

Radugin’s words only lasted a few months, however, as Vladimir Putin’s new administration decided to change the anthem yet again. Their solution was solidly in the tradition of Russian bluntness — they simply restored Stalin’s anthem. However, they again needed new words, and so Mikhalkov, now 87, wrote his third and final set of lyrics for the song. References to communism and Lenin were switched and replaced with mentions of God, seas and forests, wisdom and glory, and loyalty to the fatherland, and the new Russian anthem was debuted in December 2000.

For those keeping count, that’s nine anthems in nine decades, with seven sets of lyrics for five pieces of music written by thirteen different writers and composers. Mikhalkov, most prolific amongst them, died in 2009 aged 96. Additionally, each soviet republic also had their own anthem, and there were also anthems for the communist party and the army. Hear them all, with hundreds of variations, at Hymn.ru and Marxists.org. Perhaps there’ll be another new version soon enough. To finish, however, here is possibly the most rousing — or terrifying — version of the song, sung by over 6,000 Russian soldiers in Red Square in 2007, to mark Victory Day, as artillery fires in the background: