Nose-vember

So on Cute Overload, "Nom-vember" won, but here on Chirayliq it's still "Nose-vember".

Here are some random noses I found on photosight.ru (click them for larger size):


"Now, let's come up with something ... :-)" by Макс5


"Bad, or good?" by M.Biakaev


"Gogi and Givi send their regards" by AV: pashis пашис


"Absolutely insane picture about how two Georgian aesthetes spent their leisure time in a cultivated manner" by Ираклий Шанидзе


"1946: Pashka, the artillery soldier" by Vojage-Vojage
"In the photo is Pavel Belyakov, who went through the war, survived, but became almost completely deaf (because of the guns), then served until around 1960-63. He had great success among the ladies. An interesting thing is that he never wore his medals, of which he had quite a number, when he was on duty. He was Kuban Cossack."

The colour photographs of Sergei Mikhailovitch Prokudin-Gorskii

This topic was suggested to us by a reader. I had seen some of Prokudin-Gorskii's fascinating photographs before, but I hadn't realised to what extent he had made portraits of handsome Central Asian men ...

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) was an innovator in colour photography. In the early 1900's, he formulated an ambitious plan to document the Russian Empire in full colour. He wanted to educate the empire's young citizens of its vast and diverse history, culture and modernization.
Tsar Nicholas II supported this project, and in 1909-1912, and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation.

According to Wikipedia, "his process used a camera that took a series of monochrome pictures in rapid sequence, each through a different colored filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly-colored light, it was possible to reconstruct the original color scene. Any stray movement within the camera's field of view showed up in the prints as multiple "ghosted" images, since the red, green and blue images were taken of the subject at slightly different times.
He also successfully experimented with making color prints of the photographs, but the process was complicated and slow. It was only with the advent of digital image processing that multiple images could be satisfactorily combined into one."

The resulting images give a unique insight to an era we are used to seeing in monochrome only.

The Library of Congress has made a large amount of his photographs of landscapes, architectural monuments, industry, transportation and people available on their site. Here is a small, unsorted selection of his portraits from the vast Russian Empire ... Click to see them larger.


A fabric merchant in Samarkand. Note the framed Koran page above the stall.


Georgian tomato merchant near Sochi.


On the Registan, Samarkand.


A tea room in Samarkand.


A shashlyk restaurant in Samarkand.


A shepherd outside Samarkand.


At the Salyuktin mines on the outskirts of Samarkand.


A carpenter in Samarkand.


Fat tail sheep on the Golodnaya steppe.


Nazar Magomet, Golodnaya steppe. Note the doggie!


A Turkmen man posing with a camel loaded with sacks, probably of grain or cotton. Camel caravans remained the most common means of transporting goods in Central Asia well into the railroad era.


A young Bashkir.


A Bashkir switchman near the town of Ust' Katav on the Yuryuzan River between Ufa and Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountain region of European Russia.


Packaging department, Borzhom (today's Borjomi, Georgia).


A man in a courtyard, place unknown.


A shashlyk restaurant, Samarkand.


Doctors in Samarkand.


Mullahs by a mosque, Azizia, Batumi.


A Sunni Muslim man of undetermined nationality in Dagestan.

Finally, here is a black and white photograph, which nonetheless has very interesting subjects ...


Barbers in the Registan, Samarkand.

In South Ossetia

A ceasefire is in place between the Russian and Georgian armed forces, but it is apparently very fragile. There is a lot of distrust between the parties, and the situation is very unstable. Estimates say that about 100,000 people are displaced, and up to 2,000 people - soldiers and civilians - have been killed so far (though the latter number is thought to be exaggerated, and anyone can only guess, because there is no information).

The conflict in South Ossetia is as much about media, and it is very difficult to trust any reports.
But a news report that most certainly cannot be disputed is that there are many handsome men involved in the conflict on all sides ...


A Georgian tank soldier in Gori on Saturday. From AP by George Abdaladze via daylife.


Chechen special forces soldiers from the Vostok (East) army unit sit atop of an APC as they move toward Tskhinvali on Saturday. From Reuters via daylife.


Georgian soldiers returning from Tskhinvali on Sunday. From AP via Der Spiegel.


A Russian peacekeeper sits at the checkpoint near Tskhinvali on Sunday. From Reuters via daylife.


A physician treats an injured man in a hospital in Dzhava, South Ossetia, on Sunday. From AP by Musa Sadulayev, via daylife.


A South Ossetian soldier secures an area next to a destroyed Russian armoured personnel carrier in Tskhinvali on Sunday. From Reuters via daylife.


A Russian soldier takes cover as a tank convoy enters Tskhinvali on Monday. From AP by Mikhail Metzel, via daylife.


A protester carries a Georgian flag and shouts anti-Russian slogans outside the Russian embassy in Beijing on Monday. From Reuters via daylife.


Russian soldiers drink water in Tskhinvali on Monday. From AFP/Getty Images via daylife.


A Georgian soldier smokes as Georgian forces head towards Tbilisi on Monday, just outside Gori. From Getty Images via daylife.


Soldiers, part of a Russian military convoy, travel on their way on a main road leading to the Georgian city of Zugdidi today, Wednesday. From Reuters via daylife.

In The News

I feel like a sad person for posting here two hours after midnight, but Russian military has launched an offensive into separatist South Ossetia after Georgian troops invaded the region.

The allegiance of South Ossetia is disputed. Officially, it belongs to Georgia. There is a strong separatist tendency and the region split de facto from Georgia after a civil war 1990-1992. Most of the inhabitants are Russian citizens. Russia supports South Ossetia financially and has maintained a military force there, as a part of a mixed "peace corps". NATO supports Georgia and its territorial claims. International law does not sanction the two referendums in South Ossetia that supported separation in 1992 and 2006. Georgia accuses Russia of trying to annex both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian leaders who demanded self-determination for South Ossetia had a different standard for Chechnya. The USA has been treating Georgia as a loyal ally - there are Georgian troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and American military advisors in Tbilisi. The UN security council cannot agree on a consistent policy.

Da haben wir den Salat.

Neither Russian nor Georgian top politicians have been any poster children for democracy lately. Saakashvili has been cracking down on political opposition. Putin shows class by demanding revenge for dead soldiers rather than namby-pamby justice. The American presidential candidates are trying to trump each other in their reactions against Russian aggression and ask Russia to respect Georgian territory (when history jokes, she is not exactly subtle isn't she?).

What is really horrible is the plight of the ordinary people.

Some headlines translated from Der Spiegel, my main German news source after Titanic Magazin (which is currently focused on lampooning the Olympics, China and the West):

Photos: Thousands are fleeing the battles in South Ossetia
Analysis: Conflict of South Ossetia - Proxy War About Power and Resources
Portrait: President Saakashvili - Superman in Crisis
Europe Caught By Caucasian War On The Hop: Nobody listens to the EU as usual - not that the EU leaders have anything more sensible to say. Even NATO seems to have been startled by the sudden outbreak of violence.

And a headline from Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's largest newspaper:
Saakashvili: "We are like the Finns in the Winter War" (the real treat of the article is the flaming comments section, where readers debate if this is a valid comparison, political propaganda or an insult against Finland's national honour)

Georgian Jazz, 1969

Folk/jazz fusion band Orera from the Georgian SSR performs "Krimanchuli" in the TV film "Moscow in notes" (1969). Found in WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Library Lover

Sorry, I just couldn't resist the cheeky title. But there is an entirely valid reason for it...

As a (former) university employee, I for some reason keep receiving Lund University's internal magazine LUM. Usually I leaf through it and recycle, but this time - Chirayliq opportunity!

The Raoul Wallenberg institute is assisting the modernization of the Public Defender's Office library in Tbilisi. Lund University has contributed with a financial grant to a teacher who will help educate librarians at Tbilisi State University. The public libraries in Georgia suffer from financial cuts, lack of modern literature and international contacts, and lack of modern database technology. Hopefully the co-operation will also have some effects here in Sweden. In spite of all their problems, the Georgian libraries have something that we seriously lack...

... hot librarians.
George Amariani works at the Public Defender's Office library. And now he's famous in Sweden. Note the little pink and white button - it's the Library Lovers button, in support of The Swedish Library Association's campaign for increased political commitment to publicly financed libraries. Sweden is able to export librarian skills, but what about the libraries back home?

Don't take your free public library for granted. Libraries (and librarians) need love!

Georgians With Pets #2

me, originally uploaded by www.paata.ge.

Mr Vardanashvili is a Georgian photographer. Check out his Flickr photostream for beautiful photos from the Caucasus and around the world. His website is www.paata.ge

Georgians with Pets #1

Zaza. Cattle Drive Tusheti by Trix Zürcher, originally uploaded by grijsz.

I've wanted to blog this photo for months. The Cattle Drive Tusheti event is beautifully documented on Flickr. Tusheti, in the north-east of Georgia, is the homeland of the Tush people who have their own unique traditions, for example the great cattle drive between pastures twice a year. Of course, they also cherish their own breed of Caucasian Ovcharka, the mighty sheepdog. Don't miss this Tusheti Flickr set by German artist grijsz living in Tblisi, with lots of puppies, horses and fun. He also has a nice blog with lots of photos and information about Georgia, travelling and art.

Iosif Vissarionovich

Well, we already have a tag called "Stalin", and Stalin used to be quite the babe when he was young, so it was only a question of time until we would get to this. (We have a "Lenin" tag, too, but Lenin wasn't that attractive - he lost his hair very early and was generally rather asexual - as opposed to the womanizer Stalin, who kept the thick hair on his head until his death.)

Stalin in 1902, at age 24:





These are mug shots by the police in Batumi, where he was arrested for organising several large workers’ demonstrations.
(The first photo, according to Wikimedia commons, is from the book "Josef Wissarionowitsch Stalin - Kurze Lebensbeschreibung", Publishing for Russian literature in foreign languages, Moscow 1947", and the second was featured in E. Radziński's "Stalin. Pierwsza pełna biografia oparta na rewelacyjnych dokumentach z tajnych archiwów rosyjskich", Warszawa 1996.)



In 1919, at age 41, with comrades Lenin and Kalinin at the VIII Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin was still kind of good-looking. Or maybe this photo was retouched.

Unfortunately, Stalin suffered many abuses during his childhood and youth, was apparently just generally a bit of an a*****e, and ended up a grown-up with severe psychological problems, which turned out to be lethal for an immense number of people when he gained more and more power in the Soviet Union. (His story is quite typical for many politicians, though maybe a bit extreme.)

Those who in spite of everything would like to feel a bit of sympathy towards him might be interested in Vladimir Sorokin's novel "Blue Lard", where Stalin gets to show a soft spot in his mad love affair with a rather dominant Khruschev.

Racial stereotypes for Soviet policemen

Click to enlarge. This was sent to us by reader Ilshat Nazipov (unfortunately, he didn't include any nice photos of himself ... see his homepage).

It's a diagram of how males of different races in the Soviet Union supposedly look, used by Soviet police to identify nationalities.

It's funny how the 'Tatar' looks just like Lenin, though Tatars weren't such a prominent part of his very mixed ancestry ("Russian, Kalmyk, Jewish, German and Swedish, and possibly others", according to biographer Dmitry Volkogonov.) It's strange that the 'Georgian' doesn't look exactly like Stalin (probably because this was post-thaw, when the Soviet regime had distanced itself from Stalin). I wonder if it's a pure coincidence that the 'Tatar', the 'Jew' and the 'Gypsy' are next to each other. And we suspect that when the artist got to the 'Tajik' and the 'Turkmen', it was already close to deadline or the end of his workday, so he just drew something random - that's why they look a bit more imaginative than the others.

Ainur can't get over how cute the 'Jew' is.

Another flashback of potential Pan-Asian dating that I missed out on ...

I might have a date tonight with a guy from Georgia, and that probably gave me this sudden flashback from a party at Moscow State University, and how I managed to miss out on some potential romance (once again) ...

I was going to leave the party, because I was tired and wanted to get back to my room before they locked up the elevators (at midnight, I think). As I was saying bye to one of my classmates, two young guys approached us and stroke up a conversation.

One of them was broad, outgoing and athletic, not my type at all, while the other one was lean and a bit more quiet and serious (i.e. drop-dead hot stuff!). They were both from Georgia, they said. Although my classmate had enormous boobs, the hot guy was the one who had his sights on me. (Or maybe the other guy was just more dominant, and wanted to hog off those boobs, I don't know ...)

But still, I was so focused on getting back to my room that I didn't realise the great prospects of this encounter, and just left after a short while.

I never saw him again. :o(

The Georgian Gigolo - the Russians and their southern neighbours

The following is an excerpt from an essay I wrote during my studies of Russian cultural history – “Persons of Caucasian Nationality” – Xenophobia and Imperialism in Russia. You can read the full text here in Swedish (and Russian). Note: Of course, with "Caucasians" I will be referring to people from the Caucasus Region, and not the US-American label for "white" people.

In the last decades of the Soviet Union, there was one very popular stereotype about people from the Caucasus region. It was born after Stalin’s death and the following more relaxed approach to his legacy. Now, people were finally able to openly tell anecdotes about Stalin, where he often appeared as a womanizer.

In the mid-1960’s, the image of “the Georgian gigolo from the Black Sea coast” was becoming widespread. Stalin’s ethnic background, and the fact that many popular holiday resorts located on the Black Sea coast were in Georgia, led to this stereotype being projected primarily on Georgians, although it was applied also on all other Caucasian nationalities.

“The Georgian gigolo” appeared not least in anecdotes:

A foreign woman asks a Georgian: “Sprechen Sie deutsch?” – “Of course I want to!” he answers with a willing smile. (Tsutsiev 1998, part 1.3 – my translation)

He also appeared in contemporary fiction. In the short story To tell or not to tell by Viktoria Tokareva, the heroine Artamonova has a short-lived affair with the Georgian Vakhtang, who has a difficult time working as an actor, because he is “too beautiful”.

Artamonova understood: he needed to change his profession. For instance, he could be a paid lover in the West at expensive hotels. But how can you tell a man something like that? (Tokareva 2000 – my translation)

Soviet women liked the attractive and friendly “Georgians” they met on their seaside holidays, while Soviet men quite often experienced an inferiority complex towards their southern rivals. It was – and it is still – a common conception that Caucasian men possess extreme abilities in the sexual field (a stereotype that is eagerly confirmed by some Caucasian men, according to my interviews with Natig Jafarov from Azerbaijan, 2001–2003). Seifali Akhundov writes in the article The Caucasian and the woman, the woman and the Caucasian:

A long, long time ago on the street in winter, a drunk proletarian stopped me and unexpectedly asked: “Is it true that you people (from the Caucasus, he meant – S.A.) don’t have a straight one, but a bent one?” Of course, I didn’t care to answer him, but the nature of the question intrigued me. Firstly, I thought back then that the form and size of the reproductive organ do not depend on ethnic background. Secondly, as I assumed later, this question was rather of a rhetoric character and, probably, bore witness of an inferiority complex towards Caucasians, as experienced by some Russian men, mainly thanks to the myths about the incredible masculine power of Caucasians. In this case, an out-of-the-ordinary form of the organ was seen as one advantage. (Akhundov & Pishchikova 2001 – my translation)

Another stereotype that slowly developed during the same period, and often became blurred with ”the gigolo” is ”the market trader Georgian”. This stereotype was of an even more malicious character.

Like a broken, quarrelsome twig on the human tree, he sticks out on all the Russian markets, from Murmansk to Norilsk, disrespectfully swindling the unsuspecting northern people … Greedy, illiterate, of those who in Russia pejoratively are called “soul worth a kopeika [the smallest unit of Russian money]”, everywhere he throws away all restraint, everywhere with pockets wide open, money shiny from unwashed hands, everywhere he tosses money … (Viktor Astafjev, Catching Gudgeons in Georgia, cited by Tsutsiev 1998, part 1.4)

One example where the stereotypes of ”the gigolo” and ”the market trader” are combined – as two sides of one coin – can be found in Yulia Voznesenskaya’s The Ladies’ Decamerone. The novel tells about ten Soviet women of various backgrounds, who in the spirit of Boccaccio in the course of ten days tell each other stories under different topics. Certainly, when the topic of “first love” comes up, the holiday romance of a young girl at the Black Sea can't be missing – which, however, meets its tragic end at the hands of a jealous rival:

“Well, did you come to your senses yet? Have you understood that he isn’t suitable for you? You realise, don’t you, that your parents would never allow you to marry a Georgian who can hardly read and write. Just you wait, one day you’ll see him standing at the market selling tangerines and mimosa!”
That thought really made me blush. Because we were brought up to regard all trade, and especially market trade, as the most unsuitable – yes, shameful! – business that anyone could engage in. (Voznesenskaya 1985, p. 29 – my translation)

…

In the early 1990’s, anti-Semitism seemed to be the most widespread form of racism in post-Soviet Russia. But in the growing wave of xenophobia it would soon prove to be “persons of Caucasian nationality” who were subject to the worst form of discrimination and the most of the racist slurs. The antipathies that earlier had found their expression in the stereotypes of “the market trader Georgian” have since the wars in Chechnya virtually exploded in the stereotypes about “the Chechen terrorist”.

---------------------------

Illustrations:

1. A random Georgian from the gallery of nukri.org, by the user VAKISPARKI.

2. Another random Georgian from nukri.org, by the user Kolxi.

3. Cover of the record “A Georgian is waiting for you” by mushy Georgian-Russian singer Soso Pavliashvili, who plays with Russian stereotypes about Georgians.

4. “I'm Georgian!” - a picture that can be seen randomly posted in Russian discussion forums. This elephant seal's nose apparently has a likeness to the racist stereotype of Georgians. Interestingly enough, this nose shape is also an inherent trait of typical racist caricatures of Jews.

References:

Akhundov & Pishchikova 2001 = Ахундов, Сейфали и Пищикова, Евгения: Кавказец и женщина, женщина и кавказец, pseudology.org 2001

Tokareva 2000 = Токарева, Виктория: “Сказать, не сказать”, Будет другое лето, Вагриус, Москва 2000

Tsutsiev 1998 = Цуциев, Артур: Русские и кавказцы – очерк незеркальной неприязни, Вестник IC I, Владикавказ 1998 (offline?)

Voznesenskaya 1985 = Voznesenskaja, Julia: Kvinnornas decamerone, Bokförlaget Alba, Malmö 1987

Georgians on Flickr

One of the Flickr groups focusing on Georgian culture is "The Georgians". Its manifesto: "We try to catch the individuality of a small but outstanding nation: The Georgians."

Here are some samples from the vast image pool. Click on the photos to see descriptions and larger format at Flickr.



Photographers, from top left to bottom right: 1. grijsz, 2. Rapho, 3. & 4. Paata, 5. grijsz, 6. & 7. Paata, 8. shioshvili.