In the 1920s, a Soviet aviation group invented their own sort of superhero: Egor Poddevkin, the dashing pilot. In a series of short stories, Poddevkin flies around the country, performing heroic deeds for dazzled peasants. He fights plagues of locusts with crop dusting, douses raging fires from the air, and comes to the rescue of snow-beset villages in his “enchanted sled.” In the real world, however, Poddevkin was performing a very different service for the Soviet Union.

Historian Scott W. Palmer describes how Soviet officials used the airplane as a symbol to push modernization and to connect rural peasants to urban centers. Still a relatively new technology in the ’20s, airplanes possessed a potent combination of practicality and mystique. This made them well suited to technological propaganda.

Nikolai Raizanov created Poddevkin for the Society of Friends of the Airfleet (ODVF, in Russian acronym). The Communist Party established the ODVF in 1923 to promote aviation and the construction of an air fleet. In addition to literature, they created poems, posters, and films to promote aviation. Although they were fairly low quality, films like 1923’s Contact! followed a similar pattern to the Poddevkin stories, bringing the exploits of heroic pilots to life. This was particularly important given that much of their peasant audience was illiterate, Palmer explains.

More to Explore

The Birth of the Soviet Union and the Death of the Russian Revolution

Jonathan Davis

December 21, 2022

The Russian Revolution promised—and for a time delivered—freedom to the peoples of the Tsarist Empire. That freedom ended with the creation of the USSR.

The ODVF recruited Red Army veterans to fly around the country distributing this propaganda and flying demonstration flights. As in the Poddevkin tales, they emphasized the practical value of the machines for the peasantry. But they were also hoping for a deeper cultural transformation.

In their narratives, the enemies of the peasants extended beyond locusts, fires, and snow. The ODVF stories often depict pilots “protecting peasant households from the machinations of monarchists, capitalists, kulaks, and foreigners,” Palmer writes. They are filled with themes of class conflict—and drunken Orthodox priests.

The League of the Militant Godless had formed in 1924, and the ODVF joined their fight against religion. Pilots took peasants into the sky, pointing out the absence of God and the angels in “air-baptisms.” On the cover of the satirical magazine Krokodil, a comic shows Soviet planes attacking Jesus, Mary, and a group of terrified businessmen. A poem describes the scene:

In the heavens a wild affray
God’s been shot down by an airplane
On the ground another one
Has the capitalists on the run.

Like the crop dusters flying over fields to eradicate locusts, the ODVF “flew cultural reconnaissance in an early effort to eradicate rural traditions,” Palmer writes. They were trying to drag the peasant population into a new technological era. To Soviet leaders, the ultimate goal was cultivating smychka, or “union,” between peasants and urban workers. But their methods could often cross over into condescension, Palmer argues, mirroring the attitudes of imperialism that the Soviets often criticized.

“In the end,” he writes, “their efforts to realize these machine-age dreams revealed an ideology of dominance that used aeronautical technology to legitimate and construct a new Soviet culture.”

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.

The post Convincing Peasants to Fly in the Soviet Union appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

“In this human-made paradise, entertainment reigned supreme, and all forms of leisure had their whispered, rum-breathed price.”

A semi-regular guest column about regularly ignored places

Each year, as many as twenty-five million people visit the sacrificial landscape of Pattaya, Thailand. If visitors don’t arrive by air, then they likely take the eight-lane motorway that zips them along the eastern Thai seaboard from Bangkok to the shores of Chonburi province.

They come for rest and relaxation, purportedly. Frantic development over the decades has put Pattaya at a far remove from its past as a pristine, natural coastline. It’s a place made to concede itself. Disuse does not define the area’s state of wild abandonment, but rather the hedonistic exploitation and exhaustion of land and sea in a bargain for economic prosperity.

In my 1980s childhood, my family often enjoyed weekend stays on the shores of nearby Bang Saen—at the time a tranquil beach, with tall coconut trees and beach morning glories that grew between small bungalows and seafood eateries catering to Thai vacationers—and we’d also usually drive a little farther south on Sukhumvit Road to Pattaya. The beaches by then had already been given over to unfettered tourism, and each visit offered something new to ooh and aah about: barely finished high-rise condominiums casting shadows across the sand; newly constructed luxury hotels looking out over wide blue pools lined with sunbathing, bare-chested foreign guests; and down by the waves, shacks that had popped up to rent rigs and offer boats for recently introduced beach activities, like windsurfing, parasailing, scuba diving, and, most noisomely, Jet Skiing.

Nights in Pattaya were eye-openers for a child. Thoroughfares along the beaches came alive with bar girls dancing under pink neon lights and sunburned Europeans cheering live muay Thai matches. Nightclubs, cabarets, and sex shows welcomed all who carried cash. In this human-made paradise, entertainment reigned supreme, and all forms of leisure had their whispered, rum-breathed price.

The philosopher Marc Augé coined the term non-place to describe geographies interrupted by supermodernity and cleansed of their anthropological relationships, histories, and identities to function as conduits of globalized systems. For me, the term non-place also describes an entire ecological locale that has been reset, its natural history and diversity turned over and remade to serve outside demands—in Pattaya, the transient touristic populations that flow through daily.

Pattaya used to be a little-known seaside village, inhabited by a few hundred people split into two small fishing communities. Historical records describe an almost-two-mile sandy beach where villagers kept their boats during severe monsoons, protected by the islands of Koh Larn and Koh Sak. Marine life thrived, with abundant coral reefs and undisturbed nesting beaches for sea turtles. Palms grew thick along the southernmost shores, and the villagers called the area Palmyra Beach, later renamed Jomtien for a princess from the mythical kingdom said to exist there in a hidden realm.

Then came violent change as war escalated in Southeast Asia. In the 1960s, with the Vietnam War buildup, US soldiers stationed at military bases around the country came looking for a good time. Pattaya’s lore describes an initial truck convoy of a few hundred GIs descending on the village to rent beach houses. The drunken, sordid revelries shattered the tranquility, and Pattaya found itself rocking-and-rolling to accommodate the influx of American military personnel (almost fifty thousand at the peak of the war, with many others from elsewhere).

The ensuing highway construction in the 1970s turned Sukhumvit Road into Highway 3, and many new hotels opened to welcome the visitors now arriving from seemingly everywhere in the world. Around the time of my childhood visits, the tourism-industrial complex in Pattaya was ramping up, securing investment to build nearly 850 vacation properties by 2015; that figure has more than doubled since then, growing outward and upward from the restless beaches.

The effects are palpable—and smellable. Wherever overwhelming numbers of people gather to feast and frolic, they also foul up the place. In Bangkok, I often heard cautions about visiting Pattaya unless one wanted skin rashes. A 2016 study by the Regional Environmental Office said that the waters at Pattaya’s central beach could endanger human life, a warning apparently unheard by beachgoers who still leaped into the frothy waves. In recent years, viral photos and videos on social media have shown viscous wastewater gushing from culverts, and Pattaya and Jomtien beaches covered in sewage. Officials claimed the situation was under control, after expensive treatment plants were built, but at some point later, the sewage-dark sea returned.

Meanwhile, environmental externalities have been so distantly externalized that they keep washing back ashore. Careless boat operators, staffers and guests at nearby island venues, and beach tourists routinely get caught throwing garbage into the sea, with litter appearing on beaches, and ecologically sensitive islands declared off-limits by the navy, to protect wildlife. Almost a hundred thousand tons of garbage piled up on the popular island of Koh Larn before being buried, against the wishes of residents who fear seepage. In Pattaya, a walk along the sand to collect seashells could net a variety of items, including plastic containers, strips of fishing nets, car tires, discarded foam, broken beer bottles, and medical waste, among other delightful finds.

This is not exactly a tragic commons; both governmental regulations and high levels of investment in beach real estate and tourist operations have so far proved insufficient to compel better environmental practices. There’s no commons to be sustainably managed, because the here and now is a fluctuating, destabilized locus of transactions with a sunny beachfront. All-consuming activity reigns supreme when the continuity of a fragile marine ecosystem becomes secondary to the unrestricted fun of a global party city.

And come the wild bunch have from all over, not just for good times but also for illicit freedoms. The homegrown seediness that first attracted American GIs has deteriorated into a cosmopolitan free-for-all in the city’s underworld. Russian organized crime arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their unlawful presence in Pattaya, often denied by Thai officials, was confirmed by leaked US embassy cables mentioning Russian mob involvement in the “commission of numerous crimes, including extortion, money laundering, narcotics trafficking, real estate fraud, financial fraud, human smuggling, pandering, counterfeiting, document fraud, cybercrime, and illegal importation of cars.” They’ve since been joined by Chinese gangsters known for online gambling operations and investment scams in this anything-goes city.

In Pattaya, an unnatural paradise has arisen out of the marine idyll. External funding and top-down placemaking have meant the cultivation of any permissible earthly delight to lure an international target clientele to the region. This lucrative model has been re-created in Thailand’s other seaside tourism hubs, such as the islands of Phuket and Koh Samui, both of which have seen similar effects from natural degradation and socio-cultural erasure.

Pattaya’s tourism operators now say they’re done with the “sin city” image. They want to rebrand Pattaya as a cleaner, more enriching, family-friendly destination. The proposed solution: a casino.

Read other essays, plus interviews, advice columns, poems, reviews, and more over at The Believer.

Congress’ website for the U.S. Constitution was changed to delete the last two sections of Article I, which include provisions such as habeas corpus, forbidding the naming of titles of nobility, and forbidding foreign emoluments for U.S. officials.

The last full version of the webpage, archived by the Internet Archive on July 17, still included the now-deleted sections. Parts of Section 8 of Article I, as well as all of Sections 9 and 10 of Article I are now gone from the live site. The deletions, as of August 6, are also archived here. The change was spotted by users on Lemmy, an open-source aggregation platform and forum. 

This webpage, maintained by the U.S. government, hasn’t changed significantly in the entire time it’s been saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine—since 2019. The page for the Constitution on the National Archives website remains unchanged, and shows the entire document.   

Today’s post was written by David Langbart, archivist in Research Services at the National Archives at College Park, MD.

In January 1942, shortly after the United States was thrust into World War II by the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent December 11 declaration of war by Germany, officials in the Department of State considered the issue of the U.S. attitude toward the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gas, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare of June 1925.  Concern with gas warfare arose, however, even before the U.S. entered the war.  On November 15, 1941, the Military Intelligence Division (MID) completed and shared with the Department of State a report entitled “Japanese Use of Poison Gas in China.”  MID’s major conclusion was that Japan would “undoubtedly” use such weapons “whenever or wherever it seems necessary or profitable . . . to do so.”

By 1941, the 1925 Geneva Protocol had been ratified or adhered to by 41 nations, including all the major powers except two.  Japan had not become a party nor had the United States.  The U.S. had signed the protocol, but the Senate had never ratified it even though it was presented to that body on January 12, 1926. (The U.S. finally became a party to the protocol in 1975.) 

After World War II began in September 1939, the British, French, German, and Italian governments exchanged pledges to respect the provisions of the protocol as long as the terms were not violated by the opposing parties.  As the conflict spread, the British inquired of other countries whether they were prepared to honor the terms of the Protocol on a reciprocal basis.  By January 1942, Finland had agreed, but Japan, Hungary, and Rumania had yet to reply.  In the Department of State, the question arose of the appropriate U.S. stance.  To learn the attitude of the other U.S. government agencies with an interest in the subject, on January 12, 1942, the Department sent identical letters to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and Director of Civilian Defense Fiorello LaGuardia.  The letters provided the necessary background and closed with the following:

In view of the foregoing facts it might be desirable for this Government to indicate that it is prepared on a basis of reciprocity to observe the terms of the protocol in question.  The Department would be pleased to be    informed of your attitude in this matter.

The replies received by the Department reflected a stark divergence of opinion.

• Secretary Knox sent a one-sentence reply on January 14.  That letter stated simply that “the attitude of the Navy Department is against the use of such gases in warfare.”
• LaGuardia’s successor at Civilian Defense wrote on January 19 that “this office agrees that it might be desirable for our Government to indicate that it is prepared, on a basis of reciprocity, to observe the terms of the protocol in question.”  He then went on to add, however:

May I ask, however, that this should not prevent, delay or in any way restrict the acquisition and   preparation of every form of gas or any method of warfare, in order to be ready to retaliate should the enemies of our Government violate and break the terms of the Protocol.  In fact, I do not trust them and feel that every precaution should be taken to retaliate in the event of their disregard of the obligations set forth in the Protocol, which I now anticipate.

• Secretary Stimson’s response of February 18 differed in that he strongly opposed making a public statement. He explained his reasoning in the following letter.  His unbridled opinion is in the note he wrote at the bottom of the letter: “I strongly believe that our most effective weapon on this subject at the present time is to keep our mouths tight shut”.

At this point, no further action took place as far as the United States making a pledge.  In June 1942, however, President Franklin Roosevelt made a statement regarding U.S. action in case Japanese use of gas against China continued or if Japan used such weapons against the Allies.  He made another statement in June 1943, that expanded the scope of the warning to all the Axis powers.

Sources: Military Intelligence Division Report I.B. 152-A, Japanese Use of Poison Gas in China, November 15, 1941, file 740.00116 Pacific War/1-1/2; Secretary of State to the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Director of Civilian Defense, January 12, 1942, file 740.00116 EUROPEAN WAR 1939/468; Secretary of the Navy to the Secretary of State, January 14, 1942, file 740.00116 EUROPEAN WAR 1939/470; Director of Civilian Defense to the Secretary of State, January 19, 1942, file 740.00116 EUROPEAN WAR 1939/470; Secretary of War to the Secretary of State, February 18, 1942, file 740.00116 EUROPEAN WAR 1939/476; 1940-44 Central Decimal File (NAID 302021), RG 59: General Records of the Department of State.

When the police arrived, they also advised Dershowitz to use non-gendered pronouns. Dershowitz was hesitant. “I’ll use whatever language I choose to use,” he told the police. “That’s a matter between me and my grammarian — not anything the police should have anything to say over.”

— New York Magazine 7/31/25

All right, look. (I continue to prefer that formulation to the increasingly popular “Alright, look,” because while, unlike some of my more prescriptive colleagues, I have no quarrel with the adjectival “alright,” in the interjectory context—but I digress.) Please know that I am no longer employed by Alan Dershowitz.

Alan and I always had a somewhat tenuous business arrangement to begin with. He first approached me in the 1980s, when it was commonplace for wealthy individuals to keep full-time private grammarians on staff.

I would take my red pencil to drafts of most of his public communications, and even some personal correspondence, such as when he told his first wife to [OMITTED ON ADVICE OF COUNSEL] shortly before she [DITTO]. Cruel that letter may have been, but from a purely linguistic standpoint? Impeccable!

Yet even in the heady Nineties—the played-by-Ron-Silver days, the O.J. days—he always made sure to keep my hours under a threshold that would have triggered certain tax withholding requirements. I recall one occasion when Alan was struggling over a comma splice, which I was on the verge of resolving for him, when he looked at the clock and abruptly sent me home, muttering about the high cost of workers’ compensation insurance.

Over the years, he continued to turn to me when he needed a construction parallelized or a modifier undangled. In the wake of his association with Mr. Epstein, though, his requests took a distasteful turn. For example, a statement in which he was determined to assert that while a particular encounter at the Epstein residence had “ended happily,” it was not in fact a “happy ending” as such things are commonly defined.

It was shortly after this that I parted ways with Alan, recommending he consult one of the boutique syntax shops or even a Big Four mauve-shoe grammar firm for his needs.

Which brings us to the present kerfuffle. First of all: “Not anything the police should have anything to say over”? Alan, Alan, Alan. Perhaps you needed me more than I knew.

But as to the matter of Mr. Dershowitz’s pronoun selection, I want to emphasize that such a choice would not fall under my purview even were I still on his payroll.

How to refer to a single item sold—or, in Alan’s case, withheld from sale—by this principled vendor? I can help with that. It’s pierog, as it happens.

But deliberately misgendering the vendor? That just makes one a bloodyminded (I prefer this to the hyphenated form) prick.

I hope this clarifies matters.

bolters-and-rivets:

bogleech:

marithlizard:

Something I need to be reminded of often. Yes, I’m very lazy and also have executive problems up the wazoo (the difference? laziness is fun), but the cultural expectation of being productive every waking moment isn’t healthy either. And the business of feeding ourselves is especially fraught these days.

This is the same topic and screenshot that gave some of my chudliest chud haters such a meltdown after I posted it myself once, they raged at me for days and one by one dropped off of Tumblr forever. This subject kills idiots.

based on what we’ve found in Pompei the majority of roman citizens in the city got their food from fast food places like this

from a cultural perspective a roman’s typical daily schedual after work would look no different to a modern day worker commuting home and swinging by a fast food joint for chinese, kebab, or a pizza on the way as they unwound before bed

Human life remains the same down through the ages just as much as it changes