Post-Soviet Linguistic landscape of Russia + burying food

[John Dunn]

What a friend of mine calls 'the People's Republic of Fife', and especially the former mining area in the western part of the Kingdom (where the play is set),  is known to be the last bastion of the Communist Party in Great Britain, but even there communist councillors are elected only in penny numbers.  And for all the stories about 'red Clydeside', the Communist Party never had the sort of representation in the West of Scotland that it needed in order to influence urban nomenclature.  So that I suspect that you will search in vain even in Scotland for a Lenin Street.

On a totally different topic, I am delighted to be able to report that one of the classics of Soviet television can be seen on YouTube (actually it has been there for some time, but I've only just caught up with it).  This is the «Похороны еды» staged by the Oba-na team and available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUzS5kEXAeQ
The original clip dates from the end of 1990, but in the view of some it has acquired renewed topicality as a result of certain decisions recently taken by the Russian government; see http://www.novayagazeta.ru/columns/64745.html

John Dunn.
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From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Giuliano Vivaldi [giulianovivaldi at HOTMAIL.COM]
Sent: 08 August 2014 08:58
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Post-Soviet Linguistic landscape of Russia

You are of course correct and it was a rather silly and inadvertent oversight of mind. However, Colchester as a city has mainly been a Tory stronghold. The other city in the UK having a Stalin place name is Chatham in Kent. The connecting point between the two towns is their military connection.

It would be more appropriate to look for political connections for name locations to the Soviet Union in Scotland. There may be a few to research there. One to comes to my mind is Gagarin Way which gave the title to a play written not too long along:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagarin_Way

I seem to recall another place in Scotland being nicknamed 'Little Moscow' for the militancy of its population. Moreover, I recall hearing about a UK cabinet discussion of whether to aerially bomb its own city of Glasgow in the mid 1920s due to the militancy of its population (as this was aired on a TV programme conducted by the former head of MI5, Stella Rimington, one can be fairly certain that this is not part of a conspiracy theory).

Giuliano Vivaldi

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