New Nations for the 2010s

Sept 25, 2012


The New York Times has published an interesting interactive page about potential new nations. I hadn’t heard, for instance, that “at least a half-dozen Tuareg rebellions in the past century predate the recent declaration of Azawad as an independent state in Mali’s vast northern Sahara territory.” 

But it’s been a while since I paid any attention to any TPLACs of that part of the continent, and of course the conflict seems to be fairly byzantine. The odd thing about modern African borders, which were colonial impositions anyway, is that they’ve (mostly) lasted this long.

The one about China biting off a chunk of Siberia (#10) seems far-fetched. Sure, Moscow is far away, and the Russian state isn’t quite what it used to be. But I’d guess that any formal territorial grabs – as opposed to the informal kinds – would awaken the bear pretty quickly, and the bear would be in a vodka-besotted fury.

Interesting to note that none of the posited new nations are in the Western Hemisphere, so maybe the NYT thinks that Quebec’s secession isn’t too likely. This doesn’t involve a new nation, but I learned the other day that Bolivia has finally regained its access to the ocean, sort of.

Item From the Past: Moscow Big Mac

In late September 1994, we visited Moscow, seeing many of the places that tourists usually see: Red Square, the Kremlin, Lenin's Tomb, St. Basil's, the Pushkin Museum, and the world's largest McDonald's. You know, the McDonald's that had opened to such curious interest from Muscovites in 1990. I've read that the 23,680-square-foot McDonald's remains the world's largest even now, though an even larger one is slated to open in London in time for the Olympics next year.

By 1994, the lines were still longish, but not around the block. Even so, the Moscow location was sprawling and busy. It had bouncers. It was the only McDonald's I've ever been to that had bouncers.

Among the small group I went with that evening, I was the only American. Also represented were a Japanese (Yuriko, that is), Britons, Australians, a Swiss, and I forget who else, but it was a motley international crew. Maybe we all wanted to confirm, once and for all, that the West had won the Cold War. The food turned out to be exactly what you'd expect. It was a McDonald's, after all.

I managed to find a souvenir during my visit, one that few others probably have. A paper place mat. It's too large to scan in toto, so I did it in two pieces. First, the happy McDonald's crew. Maybe happy because it beats working on the collective farm their parents did.

The right side of the mat featured what looks to be a job application.

To residents of Russia in 1994, the application might have been just as much of a novelty as the McDonald's itself.

Suddenly This Summer

A chip of late June or even July broke loose and landed on today. That almost never happens here in the North. But it was a summer-like day, partly cloudy and temps within spitting distance of 90° F. With the bonus of no mosquitos.

This is another array of remarkable photos at the Atlantic web site, these from Russia, where the anniversary of end of World War II in Europe has not been forgotten. Not much of a to-do about VE Day here so many years later, but then again Americans are noted for their ahistorical attitudes.

That might not be so bad. Long historical memories are also raw material for bitter, bloody feuds. But even we might commemorate our victory now if, say, Canada had invaded us 70 years ago, occupied all of New England and New York, the Great Lakes states and the Pacific Northwest, and was only dislodged at the cost of 25 million dead.

Whether we visibly remember or not, the war's legacy is still with us. This series of photos, also from the Atlantic, shows that all too well. We might not test them any more, but the bombs are still around.

Nuclear Notes

Time, I figure, to reacquaint myself with other nuclear accidents. Back when I took a seminar about the Manhattan Project, that subject was an appendix to my studies. That was so long ago that Chernobyl hadn't happened yet, and previous Soviet nuclear accidents were mostly still secret, such as the one at the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant near the city of Kyshtym in 1957, when tons of nuclear waste overheated and apparently caused a non-nuclear explosion that released radiation in an amount second only to Chernobyl.

Chernobyl might have remained secret longer but for how far the radiation blew. Word got out, of course. The first I heard of it was at a little store, and post office substation, in the first floor of the building in Nashville where I worked at the time. The proprietor, a bearded, chatty fellow, told me that "a nuclear power plant blew up in Russia." Unlike the Challenger accident a few months earlier, I don't remember that we huddled around our small workplace black-and-white TV that day to find out more, and looking up information on line wasn't an option.

I haven't had time to make it all the way through "Meltdown in Chernobyl," an episode of the excellent series Seconds From Disaster, but what I've seen so far is good.

The Windscale fire of 1957 -- clearly a bad year for nukes -- is an incident that ought to be better known. Maybe it is in Britain, but not here. In those days, the British were eager to make plutonium and tritium for an assortment of nuclear weapons, and let's just say that corners were cut. I'm not any kind of expert on nuclear energy, but even I'm astonished that Windscale featured an air-cooled reactor. With a chimney. The accident involved a massive fire in the reactor and clouds of radiation going up and out through the chimney. It seems that the crew narrowly averted a much larger disaster.

The gruesome SL-1 accident in early 1961 in Idaho inspires morbid fascination. I might be misremembering, but I first saw it mentioned on a calendar I had at some point in the mid-70s (published by National Lampoon?). The theme of the calendar was something bad every day, and the January 3rd entry mentioned that three men had died in a nuclear accident that day, but details were sparse, it being a calendar.

"Three workers were reassembling the control rod drives on 3 January in preparation for startup the following day," notes a site called Johnston's Archive, which is maintained by a physicist. "At about 9:01 PM the three workers were on top of the reactor when one manually removed the center control rod as rapidly as possible, over a 0.5-second period. The reactor became supercritical... producing a steam explosion. The worker who extracted the rod was killed instantly, impaled on the building's ceiling by a control rod... [One] hypothesis is that the rod was intentionally withdrawn in an act of murder-suicide; this was the conclusion of the investigation of the incident."

So as not to end on such a glum note, here's an amusement from Johnston's Archive, "A TEXAN definition of a planet." Or maybe he's serious. But I'm amused.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin

More snow last night. But only about an inch, so the main effect was covering up the bumps and irregular mounds created by the intense shoveling and snowblowing of the last few days. Weather chronologists say that this has been the snowiest February on record in the Chicago area -- which was already the case by February 2.

So we turn to indoor activities. Lately we've acquired Just Dance 2, a Wii game. Usually I'm off doing something else when the girls or the girls and their friends are playing with it, but I can hear songs from its eclectic selection of dance tunes. The other day I was in the kitchen when I heard:

Ra-Ra-Rasputin
Lover the of the Russian queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra-Ra-Rasputin
Russia's greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on

What? A disco song about Rasputin? One that manages to rhyme "Rasputin" with "queen" and "machine"?

Sure enough, the Euro-disco group Boney M -- the creation of a German producer -- released just such a song in 1978. If I heard it then, I don't remember, and I think I would have remembered a song about Rasputin, whatever the genre. With certain exceptions, Euro-disco did not play much on American airwaves at the time, and I wouldn't have sought it out in those pre-Internet days. The only song of Boney M's I vaguely think I heard back then was "Rivers of Babylon."

The video for "Rasputin" is all kinds of funny, often unintentionally. Sorry to say, however, that the male member of the group, Bobby Farrell -- wearing the faux beard in the video, which must have made the lip-synching easier, and dancing up a storm -- was in the news recently for dying. On December 29 (N.S.) in St. Petersburg, same day and city as Rasputin.

Naturally, the mad monk's famed death is mentioned by the song too.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin
Lover the of the Russian queen
They put some poison into his wine
Ra-Ra-Rasputin
Russia's greatest love machine
He drank it all and said, "I feel fine"

More than anyone would need to know about "Rasputin" is
here.

Item From the Past: Irkutsk

September 21, 1994

Irkutsk has a distinctly European feel to it -- broad streets, trees lining those streets, a variety of old, short buildings. Not as much Stalinist concrete as I expected. Double windows seem standard just about everywhere, the better to deal with winter. The place is also as run-down as expected, especially the many wooden structures, which tend to be sagging and lined with character cracks. Enthusiastic rehabbers would love the place, except maybe that it's in Siberia.

Been to a variety of churches and museums, the most interesting among them the Decembrist Museum, once the Trubetskoy and Volkonsky homes, two families of Decembrists who eventually set up fairly comfortable digs in 19th-century Siberia, it seems. One church we didn't get to see was Saint I Forget Who: Our guide pointed to some drab Soviet building and explained that the largest church in Siberia used to be there, until Stalin had it destroyed. Someone asked why he had done that. “Because,” the guide answered, “Stalin was a weird dude.”

At an Irkutsk uni-plex on the 19th we saw Cliffhanger, a Stallone vehicle with some action and colorful death, especially people falling from airplanes and cliffs. It was dubbed into Russian the cheapest possible way, with one male voice reading the script as the story went along. It was a better movie without the English soundtrack, though occasionally it poked through the dubbing. "Gravity's a bitch," I heard one character say as another fell out of an airplane to his death.

Today we made an excursion to Lake Baikal. It's a clear, flat, blue, cold-looking lake, something like Lake Superior on a calm day, but with rolling, fall-foliage hills up against the shoreline. Something like Tennessee in late October, if it had a huge lake somewhere in the middle of the state. Add to that mountains in the distance, on the other side of the lake. Like the Rockies. So it's Lake Superior with Tennessee foliage and Colorado mountains. Had an excellent lunch at the Intourist Baikal Hotel -- lake fish and sour cream, very Russian. The restaurant also has a superb view of the lake.

The boat trip on Lake Baikal didn't take that long, just up and down the lake shore, with a stop near shore that allowed us to take a dip in the water. Of about a dozen of us, only two Australians jumped into the water, already -- always -- very chilly. They didn't stay in long.

Tovarisch Yuri

Ann’s favorite bedtime reading, meaning what I read to her, is from our complete Curious George collection, a hardback we got not long ago. Recently I read a little about H.A. and Margret Rey, learning that they’d escaped from Hitler carrying with them the original Curious George manuscript, which eventually made its way to American publishers.

The other day I found myself wondering, what if they’d gone east instead of west? What if their sympathies had been Stalinist? Probably this odd line of thought occurred to me because on Saturday I listened to a 1951 episode of I Was a Communist for the FBI rebroadcast on WDCB, which plays old-time radio on Saturday afternoons.

Anyway, I re-imagined the output of the Reys as refugees to Soviet Russia. First would have been Comrade George, of course. “This is George. He is a good little monkey and always on the side of the proletariat… He lives with his comrade, the apparatchik with the yellow hat…”

Later books would have included:

Comrade George Fingers a Counterrevolutionary

Comrade George Liquidates a Kulak

Comrade George Gets the Order of Lenin

Comrade George Assists the Five-Year Plan

Comrade George Thwarts U.S. Imperialism

The books were used in Soviet primary education in the ’40s and early ’50s, but alas were banned in 1952 when the Reys vanished into the gulag, only to re-appear in 1992. The books, that is, not the Reys.