In 2003, the lamentable and vulgar government of Britain launched Beagle 2, part of the European Space Agency’s ‘Mars Express’ programme. It contained a pop song fragment by ‘Blur’ and an “artwork” by Damien Hirst to calibrate its cameras and spectrometers. The whole thing was a failure, contact with Beagle 2 being lost six days prior to its scheduled entry into the Martian atmosphere.

Whereas we sent dull pop music and bad art, the Russians have one-upped us again. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first man in space, they’ve taken an icon of Our Lady of Kazan aboard the Soyuz TMA-24 mission.

(With apologies to Comrade First Secretary Krushchev for the paraphrased post title.)

In Russia, they build churches that look like churches. (As can be seen from the above video showing the consecration of the new cathedral). Meanwhile, in Los Angeles…

via Orthocath and CB for P

ANOTHER VICTORY DAY in Moscow — sixty-five years now since the Allied Powers defeated the crisply attired Axis of Nazi Germany and her slightly foppish cohort Fascist Italy. Russia commemorates V-E Day a day “late” because the German instrument of surrender entered into force at 23:01 CET on May 8, 1945 — by which time it was already May 9 in Moscow. For this reason most countries within the ex-Soviet sphere celebrate the end of the Second World War a day later than in western Europe. It is also customary on this day for patriotic citizens to wear the orange-and-black ‘Ribbon of St. George’, which recalls the Military Order of the Holy Great-Martyr and the Triumphant George established in 1769 and revived in 1994. The Order of St. George is the highest military honour awarded by Russia after the paramount Order of St. Andrew.

The military parade in Red Square was accompanied by the usual aeronautical fly-past. Above, from right to left, helicopters carry the Russian flag, the Armed Forces flag, the Naval Ensign (a blue saltire on a white field, the inverse of the Scottish flag), the Air Force flag, and the flags of other components of the Russian Armed Forces.

Very gradually and without much publicity, the Russian government has begun to replace the red stars that top the towers of the Kremlin and neighbouring buildings with the double-headed eagles of old.

What made this the most remarkable Victory Day parade so far was the unprecedented move of allowing foreign soldiers to take part. Governments of the countries to which the Soviet Union was allied in 1945 were invited by the Russian government to send delegations of troops to take part in the march-past. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (with 57 seats the second-largest party in Russia’s parliament after the 315 seats of the conservative ‘United Russia’ party) expressed its outrage at the inclusion of foreign troops in the Victory Day parade and responded with protests.

This even included a contingent of soldiers, sailors, and airmen from Poland, a country which was the victim of an unprovoked invasion by the Soviet Union in 1939, though Stalin later forged a disingenuous alliance with the Polish government before setting up his own putative Polish power. The Soviets, of course, were responsible for the notorious massacre of over 20,000 Polish officers at the forest of Katyn.

A detachment from 2nd Battalion the Welsh Guards marched in the parade…

A number of militaries from the former members of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union also participated, including Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.

With a number of high-ranking officials and heads of state in the reviewing stand, security was tight. Snipers were also placed at prominent points to take down any spectators who felt inclined to make Yakoff Smirnoff jokes (“In Soviet Russia, car drives you!”).

Following the parade, Russians engaged in the traditional Victory Day piss-up.

The evening beheld a spectacular pyrotechnic display, a brilliant festival of lights over the Kremlim, smack dab in the heart of deepest Muscovy. The Russians know how to put on a good show.

I can’t remember who it was that, watching the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, said never in his right mind did he expect that within just a decade Washington would be the chief propagator of worldwide revolution and the Kremlin would be a relatively conservative power, guarding jealously its local sphere of influence. What could add more of a dash of the absurd (and yet, eminently sensible) than the Russian government, facing the worst crisis of population decline of any major power, promoting larger families with a poster campaign quoting the conservative American philosopher George Santayana.

I recently discovered that we receive the television channel Russia Today in our humble little flat here in Stellenbosch, and have spent the past few days enjoying it. They are shockingly truthful (almost nasty) in their reporting of international relations, in so far as the truth — for the moment — tends to favour the Russian case in world affairs, and make NATO look like a bunch of ninnies. Saturday — May 9 — was Victory Day in Russia, in which the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War is commemorated and celebrated. RT showed many minutes of splendid highlights from the great parade in Red Square, and I just sat and enjoyed it.

The Russkies still know how to do a military march-past and make it look impressive.

The President and the Prime Minister enjoyed the spectacle, which included a display of some of the latest of Russia’s investment in defense technology. No doubt there was also a bit of schadenfreude, as Mikhail Saakashvili — the fatuous and incompetent US-backed president of neighbouring Georgia who provoked a military conflict with Russia last year — was simultaneously observing massive opposition-led demonstrations against his autocratic rule in the capital of the Caucasian republic.

The best part of the parade for me was the impressive aeronautical display by the Russian Air Force. Here two larger planes accompanied by jet fighters time their refueling demonstration for their appearance over Red Square.

More aeronauticual displays.

Here a radar plane flies in behind one of the Kremlin cathedrals. I was tempted to entitle this one “The reactionary tendency in Russian architecture has led airports to design control towers in the form of traditional onion domes”.

A new 100,000-square-foot space displaying works from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg will open in Amsterdam this June. The Hermitage Amsterdam will be located in the Amstelhof, a former home for the elderly built in 1683 by the Dutch Reformed Church and transformed into a modern exhibition space by Hans van Heeswijk Architects. The opening exhibition, “At the Russian Court” — a “a deeply researched exploration of the opulent material culture, elaborate social hierarchy and richly layered traditions of the Tsarist court at its height in the nineteenth century” — will display 1,800 works from the massive collection in St. Petersburg and continue until the end of January 2010.

“The opening of Hermitage Amsterdam is the culmination of nearly two decades of planning,” stated Ernst W. Veen, Managing Director of Hermitage Amsterdam. “At the same time, it is a continuation of more than 300 years of close ties between Amsterdam and St. Petersburg, going back to Tsar Peter the Great’s fabled residence in our city.”

The Hermitage Amsterdam will include a café-restaurant (with the appropriately riparian name “Neva”), two museum shops, a research and study center, and an auditorium. The neighbouring Neerlandia building, which the Hermitage has used to show temporary exhibitions since 2004, will be transformed into the family-centered Hermitage for Children.

Two large exhibition halls will be complemented by forty-two smaller chambers for displaying works from the Russian museum. The landscape artist Michael van Gessel will design the courtyard garden, while retaining the old chestnut trees that currently grace the space.

The main entrance to the Hermitage Amsterdam will be from its frontage on the Amstel river. A new jetty is under construction in front of the main façade to allow direct nautical access.

Ingress to the museum will not be through the seventeenth-century doorway atop the front staircase; it is, in fact, a fake. The main entrances to the Amstelhof during its days as a residence for the elderly were actually in the flanking pavilions. The false door was placed as a unifying element for the façade, and to hide the lofty pulpit in the Kerksaal (church hall) that prevented a window from being placed there. Instead, the street grade in front of the Amstelhof will be lowered to alter the former goods entrance to a more suitable height. It’s disappointing that a more appropriate entrance was not envisioned during the design process, instead of scuttling through a modified workman’s door.

The Hermitage Amsterdam plans to mount two large-scale temporary exhibitions each year, alongside a rotating display from the museum’s collection. The grand opening in June will be celebrated with a White Nights Festival, with concerts and events along the Amstel, and the museum remaining open for twenty-four hours.

Given the youthful residence of Muscovy’s greatest emperor in the city, it seems appropriate that Amsterdam was chosen for this effort to promote Russia’s rich cultural and artistic heritage. Indeed, Peter the Great almost certainly saw the Amstelhof while he studied shipbuilding in the Netherlands during his 18-month “grand embassy”.

“Over the past years, we have found many ways to extend our artistic and intellectual resources beyond Russia’s borders,” stated Mikhail B. Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (and Chairman of the Board of the Hermitage Amsterdam). “However, we have worked with a partner to create only one great, freestanding Russian exhibition venue in the West: Hermitage Amsterdam.”

THIS MAP displaying the results of the 2007 general election for the Polish parliament is overlaid with an outline of the nineteenth-century border between the German and Russian empires. The areas formerly ruled by the German Kaiser tend to back the right-wing liberal Platforma Obywatelska (“Civic Platform”) party, while those formerly ruled by the Czar tend to support the conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (“Law and Justice”) party. (The green represents the centrist-agrarian Polish People’s Party, while the dark red represents the already-defunct “Left and Democrats” coalition).

Source: Strange Maps

Here’s a film that has it all: naval battles, mutiny, revolution, civil war, brave men, beautiful women, sin, sacrifice, and betrayal on multiple levels. But “Admiral” («Адмиралъ»), which opened in Russia this month, is notable for another reason: this is the first major film depicting the tsarist White Russians as the good guys to receive at least part of its funding from the Russian government. The eponymous hero of the film is Alexander Kolchak, the naval commander and polar explorer who later led part of the White Army fighting the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War.

Born into a naval family in St. Petersburg in 1874, Kolchak graduated from the Imperial Naval College at age twenty and began service in the tsar’s fleet. He made three polar expeditions with the Russian Academy of Sciences, including the one in which Baron Eduard von Toll, renowned expert in Siberian paleontology, went missing and died. For his efforts in exploration, Kolchak was awarded the highest honor of the Russian Geographical Society.

In the Russo-Japanese War, Kolchak commanded the Sokol-class destroyer Serdityi and sunk the Japanese cruiser Takasago. When the war ended, he participated in the rebuilding of the Russian Navy which had been severely reduced by the Asian war, and was on the Naval General Staff from 1906.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Kolchak was a high-ranking officer in the Baltic Fleet combating the rather significant German Navy. Withing two years, however, he was the youngest officer to be promoted to Vice-Admiral, and replaced Admiral Andrei Eberhardt as Commander of the Black Sea Fleet in August 1916.

Kolchak was removed from his command after a series of mutinies and disturbances among the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet contemporary to the upheavals of the February Revolution of 1917. He was sent to visit the Allied nations as a military observer and envoy instead, and travelled to Britain, America, and Japan. When the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, Kolchak volunteered his services to the British Army, and the General Staff seriously considered sending him to Mesopotamia. Whitehall, however, felt Kolchak would be more useful fighting the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the admiral returned to Russia and joined the White forces with which he gained his greatest renown.

Twentieth Century Fox got behind the director Andrei Kravchuk’s film of Admiral Kolchak’s life, with most of the funding coming from the state-controlled Channel One. The film has opened in 1,247 cinemas across Russia — a record — and Variety reports that by its first weekend “Admiral” had earned $13.2 million from over 2 million ticket sales. Kolchak the movie looks well-set to recoup the budget invested, $20 million. “While the film’s budget does not sound big to a U.S. audience,” the Discovery Institute’s Russia Blog writes, “Russian filmmakers have proved once again that they can outpace Hollywood’s production with a tenth of a Hollywood film’s budget. Also, unlike Hollywood, most of Russia’s blockbusters are historic novels put on film.”

Comparing “Admiral” to the Western box-office hit “Titanic”, co-producer Anatoly Maximov told Reuters that the film “is a story of love amid extreme catastrophe but this time it’s not a ship which is sinking, it’s the entire country”.

“It’s very important we talk about our history, our country, our officers,” director Andrei Kravchuk said. “If we understand that we had such a history, such people… we can fill ourselves with dignity, and the notion of motherland and patriotism, which can seem worn and tarnished, gains new, concrete, visible meaning.”

“Admiral” is but the latest in the recent revival in Russian cinema. Eighty-five Russian films were released in 2007 and another 200 are currently in production, compared to just forty-two releases a decade before. While much of the funding for this flourishing industry comes from the commercial sector, the Russian government is estimated to provide as much as a third of all funding for Russian films. The cinematography department of the Ministry of Culture invested $80 million in feature films in 2007, a figure that rose to $85 million for this current year.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the current renaissance is that most of the films have been long high-quality historical dramas that have also proved successful at Russian box offices. Subjects and time periods have ranged from as long ago as Alexander Nevsky to as recently as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but most tend to take place during the rule of the tsars.

“Admiral” also shows the help the White Army received from Great Britain, the United States, and France. These three countries all sent troops to fight alongside the Whites, who also counted Poles and Czechs among their ranks. It was the “Czechoslovaks” who betrayed Admiral Kolchak in the end, stealing a great portion of the tsarist gold reserve and high-tailing it back to Prague where the legionnaires set up a bank with their ill-gotten gains.

The creation of “Admiral” is a most welcome development, and one that we hope will be imitated in Russia (as it obviously will be) but elsewhere in Europe and the European diaspora. It’s heartening that both Russia is slowly but surely coming to terms with the great evil of her revolution. Equally, however, it is a great disappointment that the United States not only fails to grasp the evil of its revolution, but still foolishly persists in propagating it around the globe, often at the point of a gun.

Trailers & more pictures after the break.

“Alexander: Battle of the Neva”

“1612″

“The Sovereign’s Servant”

“The Island” (specially praised by the Patriarch of Moscow)

“9th Company”

“Russian Ark” (the film composed of one shot completed in a single take)

And of course there is the successful Night Watch and its sequel, Day Watch.