While he is soft-spoken, his rebellious humor has gotten him in trouble, as he will be the first to admit.
.. Then there was Victory Day in 2012, when Russia celebrates the defeat of the Nazis. He posted on Twitter that “67 years ago Stalin defended from Hitler his right to suppress Soviet people.”
It created an outcry at a time of rising nationalism.
Mr. Durov grinned. “It was a disaster.”
.. His main interest was developing a social network. A friend who studied in America showed him Facebook, then in its infancy, and he learned from it.
“Some things like the layout of the early VKontakte was very influenced by Facebook,” Mr. Durov said. “Otherwise it could take ages for me to build, and I was not a professional designer.”
He also recruited fellow linguistics students to build a database catering to the post-Soviet university system, a step he said gave VKontakte “a tremendous competitive advantage.”
Russia Forecasts a Recession in 2015, Signaling a Toll From Sanctions and Oil Prices
In another worrying sign, Russians have been bulking up on consumer items as the ruble depreciates, converting savings into durable goods lest their savings become worthless. Appliance stores in Moscow have seen runs on refrigerators, washing machines and televisions. It is a pattern seen before previous ruble crashes indicating evaporating faith in the currency.
Stalin, Father of Ukraine?
But there is an underappreciated aspect to this tangled history: Stalin’s rule saw the formation of a land with strong Ukrainian national consciousness. Yes, he was a murderous tyrant, but he was also a father of today’s Ukraine.
Ukraine emerged out of czarist Russia as a separate country as a result of World War I, the revolutions of 1917, German military occupation and the efforts of Ukrainian nationalists. Against the wishes of other early Soviet officials, who wanted to suppress nationalism, Stalin strongly advocated recognizing — and using — it. “Clearly, the Ukrainian nation exists and the development of its culture is a duty of Communists,” Stalin told the 10th Party Congress in March 1921. “One cannot go against history.”
Stalin knew from his Georgian homeland that national sentiment was too strong to suppress. He also knew that the Communists could use it to win loyalty and achieve economic modernization.
Cold War Puck: The Beauties of Russian Hockey
Basically, outside of these two national and notional allegiances, I favored the Russian style of play, an intricate, flowing approach that preferred puck possession and teamwork to (and Flyers haters will find this contradictory) brute force and individual achievement. Call me a Commie, if you want. I prefer to think that I was looking ahead to the post-Cold War sports landscape, when the nationality of teams or athletes mattered less than their comportment and playing style.
.. There was perhaps no sports culture as distinct as that of Russian hockey.
.. The Soviet approach to hockey evolved in a vacuum, under the tutelage of Anatoli Tarasov, a self-made hockey mastermind who was tasked by Stalin after the Second World War with creating an ice-hockey program where none had existed before. He integrated elements from ballet, chess, and bandy, and put players through rigorous and unorthodox training rituals. (Vintage footage dug up by Gabe Polsky, the film’s director, who played hockey at Yale, suggests that the key to graceful hockey is doing lots of somersaults in practice.) The players lived together most of the year and played together in units of five for years on end. The result of all this, in the rink, anyway, was a free-flowing weave of improvisational keep-away, with the flamboyance, if not the laughs, of the Globetrotters on ice. Their greatest successes, and most aesthetically pleasing performances, came when they were coached by a dictatorial apparatchik and former player named Viktor Tikhonov, whom most of them came to hate. The irony was always there and is central to Polsky’s film: a rigid, oppressive system, at both national and team levels, created the freest, most expressive hockey there ever was.