Moscow Urban Legend

[Josh Wilson]

I looked it up - and the plot thickens. 

The first working hang glider was built and tested ca. 1889 by a German
engineer named Otto Lilienthal. Although that research soon lost its
immediate importance when the Wright Brothers outdid the hang glider at
Kitty Hawk in 1902, it was big news in Germany at the time and thus it
likely remained in the national consciousness for sometime. There is a
memorial built in honor of Lilienthal in Germany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal 

Several of the prisoners that built MGU were German prisoners of war - who
very likely had had the opportunity to read the research of their
countryman. So, if it did occur, it's very possible that it was not a Soviet
citizen in the GULAG for crimes against the state, but rather a German still
in custody from WWII. How he might have been able to leave the USSR or
successfully blend into the Russian population with a false identity -
unlikely, but I suppose possible.

As to the very interesting slang corresponding with the story - I suppose
depending on which came first that it may have gave birth to the imagery -
or was made up from it. 

Thanks to Mr. Dunn and Ms. Meerson!

Josh Wilson
Asst. Director
The School of Russian and Asian Studies
Editor-in-Chief
Vestnik, The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies
www.sras.org
jwilson at sras.org



-----Original Message-----
From: John Dunn [mailto:J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 1:36 PM
To: jwilson at sras.org
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Moscow Urban Legend

I've never heard this story before, but two factors suggest its
implausibility.  The first is that it appears to pre-date hang gliders by a
couple of decades or so, while the second is that someone trying to escape
from the MGU building in c.1950 would presumably have wanted to head off in
the other direction.

To make up for it, I can, however, give you another story, no doubt equally
apocryphal (with apologies if you know it).   I heard this story when I was
a stazher in MGU in 1974, and it concerns a West German diplomat, who, when
being shown round MGU, displayed a very close interest in the state of the
walls.  When asked why, he explained that he had been one of the prisoners
who helped to put up the building and that he and his colleagues had saught
to get revenge on the Soviet authorities by incorporating deliberate
structural defects.  After contemplating the implications of this story, we
eventually decided that German building with deliberate structural defects
was probably more sound than Soviet building without them.

John Dunn.

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