an interesting survey

[John Dunn]

Normally I would be more than happy to settle for being 50% right, but in this case I should perhaps point out that my comments on the vote being 'hi-jacked' were taken from the following source:

www.newsru.com/arch/russia/08jul2008/nameofrussia.html

I would, though, never seek to deny the enduring popularity of Stalin in Russia, which makes me wonder what VGTRK were thinking of when they bought the format.  When the series was shown in the UK, nobody cared about the outcome: British history is contested in the way Russian history is, and everybody knows that programmes of this type are cheap schedule-fillers for the summer silly season and hence totally devoid of any cultural significance whatsoever.  In any event, the BBC, though not normally perhaps thought of as a stalinist organisation, has enough experience of this sort of thing that it keeps tight control both of the shortlist and of the count, so that any organised attempt to manipulate the result can be nipped in the bud.  Perhaps it is, like the fact that the Russians enter the Eurovision song context with the aim of winning it, an indication that after 17 years the fundamentally frivolous and trivial nature of Western television culture has not yet been fully grasped, but it is difficult to see how any programme concerned with Russian history could be anything than totally serious and could end in anything other than a скандал.

John Dunn.

-----Original Message-----
From: Alina Israeli <aisrael at AMERICAN.EDU>
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:53:37 -0400
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] an interesting survey

John Dunn is right: it's a small portion of the population, moreover  
the voting is done in highly unscientific way; someone on my blog  
wrote that he voted five times for Stalin. In other words, the voting  
system does not prevent you from voting as many times as you want.

On the other hand, John Dunn is wrong, because even according to the  
optimistic BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/russian/russia/ 
newsid_7155000/7155377.stm nearly one-third of the country believe  
that it was Stalin who won WWII, and this is a very powerful argument  
in Russia.


John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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