Word: lenin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Cities on both sides of this line are full of modern skyscrapers and designer retailers from the West, but the statues that grace their parks and squares make it clear which side of the line one is on. In Budapest, Lenin can only be found in the kitschy Statue Park outside the city, but he still stands in the center of Simferopol, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Crimea in Ukraine, and his name graces buildings and even the metro system in Moscow...
...Ostalgie - nostalgia for the former communist state - will fare in these cities during what will be a reflective few weeks. As memories of the old regime fade, there has naturally been an attempt to re-evaluate the D.D.R.'s legacy. In recent years, films like 2003's Good Bye Lenin!, a wry telling of reunification's effects on an East German family, have captured the imaginations of fashionable urbanites. Others have professed an occasionally ironic love for old East German aesthetics - communist-era branding, old Wartburg and Trabant cars, and vintage Praktika cameras. Rather less flippantly, the current recession...
...other countries. A similar failure to confront the truth about the G.D.R. - its violent repression and the extent to which East Germans accepted and sometimes aided the regime - expresses itself in ostalgie, the rose-tinted nostalgia for a G.D.R. that never was. Ostalgie inspired the 2003 film Good Bye Lenin! and underpins the renaissance of iconic East German brands...
...Question Lenin Asked What is not simple is Russia. That quintessentially Russian query - What is to be done? - continues to bedevil the Kremlin. The country is, after all, falling apart. The price of oil is down sharply from its high of $147 a barrel in July 2008. The markets have been badly shaken by Putin's attack on steel giant Mechel, the breakup of the oil conglomerate TNK-BP (during which the Russians none-so-subtly squeezed out their British partners), and last summer's war with Georgia. And then, of course, there's the global financial crisis, which...
...charged with inciting religious hatred after putting on an exhibition a year earlier at the Andrey Sakharov Museum in Moscow called "Forbidden Art 2006." The paintings depicted in the show were considered by authorities to be insulting to the Orthodox Church - one of the works showed a crucified Lenin, another portrayed Mickey Mouse as Jesus. Erofeyev was fired from his job at the Tretyakov in 2008, and his trial is ongoing. "Artists should not be prosecuted just because someone doesn't like what they do," says Friederike Behr, a researcher at Amnesty International in Russia. He adds that the antiextremism...