Matchbox labels

At flickr, a collection of old matchbox labels including many from the sov era.

Reassembling the Stasi files

These are some of the bags containing the ripped up Stasi files. There are 16,000 bags. Each sack contains about 40,000 fragments, for a total of 600 million pieces of paper. At the moment they are assembled by hand. They have done 327 bags so far, which works out to one bag per worker per year. They are help by the fact that the torn pieces tend to cluster in a bag. If the Stasi could have stirred all 600 million pieces things would have been a lot harder. Some people are trying to use computers to speed this up. Note that these are only the torn up files. Some files were mangled by Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally "paper-wolves" and "rip-wolves," German for shredders. No-one is attempting to assemble these, though presumably they are the most interesting. Wikipedia has a section on unshredding which says:

... there is a huge demand for document reconstruction. Several companies offer commercial document reconstruction services. For maximum security, documents should be shredded so that the words of the document go through the shredder horizontally (i.e. perpendicular to the blades). Many of the documents in the Enron accountancy scandal were fed through the shredder the wrong way, making them easier to reassemble.

Soviet Christmas Cards

The Lives of Others

It is no secret that I like Soviet stuff. When I went to Prague I delighted in staying in the Stalinist Crowne Plaza hotel pictured above. I ignored Prague's pretty European stuff which my fellow travelers from the US were enjoying and went seeking out the brutalist Sov monuments. I also liked that movie Goodbye Lenin. I obviously suffer from some weird form of Ostalgie.

Fortunately there is a cure. The Lives of Others is a superb film about life under the Stasi. I will never be able to be quite so flip about communism again. I unreservedly recommend this movie. You should try and see it before there is a Hollywood remake.

A soviet poster a day

Who says the internet is useless? If you are feeling unwell, take a soviet poster a day.

Another soviet poster

This is also a test of blogging directly from flickr. Hand edited to look decent.

Soviet posters, mmmmm!

There are 1469 of these here to look at.

OMG underground submarine base!

What is it about secret underground stuff that fascinates me so much? Maybe it's too much D&D at an impressionable age. Whatever the reason, this former Soviet submarine base at Balaklava is fantastic.

Extra! more photos of the underground base

Extra! Russian Thieves Break Into Soviet-Era Missile Silo to Find it Filled With Money Bills