Friday, February 01, 2008

An Embarrassment to Sovietology

Anne Applebaum's new piece on "where all the beautiful Russian women were under Communism" has been getting knocked around the blogosphere. Now, Applebaum has an ...interesting reputation among people in my field. Let's just say that she isn't taken seriously by all observers.

From the article:
To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines.

Umm, no.

Meet Мода и время, an authentic Soviet fashion magazine from 1979!

Also, meet some beautiful Soviet women!

Sovietology truly is the first and noblest of all the sciences.
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4 comments:

  1. DV8 2XL12:44 PM

    I'd hit it. (but then again I'm half Russian)

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  2. Christian5:19 PM

    We should get shirts that say:

    I <3
    Sovietology

    The ladies would go crazy.
    Sovietologists: 1
    Justin Timberlake: 0

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wavefunction5:01 PM

    When you say Applebaum has an interesting reputation in your field, do you mean to say people are also quite critical of her Pulitzer-winning "Gulag"? That would be a revelation.

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  4. Sovietologist5:41 PM

    Yeah, the reputation of that book among academic historians of the USSR was not quite commensurate with its reception among "lay" readers. Applebaum was actually accused by someone in the field of not being able to speak Russian, but one of my colleagues saw her signature in an archive register, so this doesn't seem to be the case.

    ReplyDelete