The Century Old Color Photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky

In 1909 a remarkable project was initiated by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. His mission was to record – in full and vibrant color – the vast and diverse Russian Empire. Here, with his story, is a selection of his amazing century old full color pictures.

Just over one hundred years ago a Russian photographer, began a remarkable project. With the blessing – and funding – of the Tsar, Nicholas II, he embarked on an extraordinary journey to capture the essence of Russia in full color photographs. Many of these pictures look as if they could have been taken yesterday, with only the costumes worn by the people captured in their moment of time betraying the age of the work. The first shows two men crossing a small river.

The Century Old Color Photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky

Image Credit Flickr User Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky

In 1909 a remarkable project was initiated by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. His mission was to record – in full and vibrant color – the vast and diverse Russian Empire. Here, with his story, is a selection of his amazing century old full color pictures.

Image Credit Flickr User Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky

Just over one hundred years ago a Russian photographer, began a remarkable project. With the blessing – and funding – of the Tsar, Nicholas II, he embarked on an extraordinary journey to capture the essence of Russia in full color photographs. Many of these pictures look as if they could have been taken yesterday, with only the costumes worn by the people captured in their moment of time betraying the age of the work. The first shows two men crossing a small river.

King Kills

A spoiled young prince embarks on a hunting trip.  What awaits him is an encounter with the spirit of the forest and a decision which will change his life forever.  This beautifully made animated short was created by a group of students at the Russian State University of Cinematography.  The story is not complex but the aesthetics of the piece make it one to remember…

The Rise of the Eagle Twins

Many people would like to start up a business over the internet yet many struggle to find the right product to market.  The Gradinar twins, Andrei and Igor, didn’t have to worry – they already knew the name of their “product” from the outset – themselves!  An interest in sports and fitness led the brothers, originally from Moldova, to develop an online presence which has proven a great success.

As well as containing some fantastic fitness advice, their videos and pictures show a great sense of humour that shows a lighter side to their personalities – not to mention a savvy understanding of the kind of content that goes down well on the internet.  As well as YouTube, they have online presences on TikTok and Instagram.

Their slickly designed Russian language website is called the Eagle Twins – which is a great name for a pair of young men who are set to fly high!  As well as appealing to the Russian fitness market, the twins are just launching their English language version on YouTube.

The twins started at Lewisham College when they were 16, successfully completing the L2 Business course. Now 17, they have progressed on to the Level 3 Diploma in Business. We took a little time out to ask Andrei and Igor some questions about how they developed their online business.  It’s an interesting story about how something that started just for fun became a serious business.

How did you first decide to create an online presence? Did you plan it as a business from the start?

When we first decided to start making content online, of course we hoped that someday we would get paid, but honestly, we didn’t really believe it would happen. We were doing it just for fun.

What was your vision when you started? Is it different today?

We were just having fun when we started making content online, now we have a clear vision of becoming TOP fitness bloggers in the world. We’ve a Russian language channel on YouTube with 120k subscriber and recently we started filming in ENG (channel: “Igor Graf”)

Where did you start? Facebook? YouTube? Instagram?

We started filming on YouTube, then Instagram and TikTok.

How fast did things start to happen? Did it take a long time?

It took around 3-4 months to gain 1000 subscribers on YouTube. In the next 3 months we got 10k and from there, step by step we’ve gained 120k subscribers, but for us we hope that is only the beginning.

Is there anything you know now that you wish you had known when you started?

Nothing comes easy, you have to work hard to see any results. A crazy idea is the most important thing when it comes to getting views on any platform.

Do you ever feel like giving up? What do you do to get past that?

Sometimes. When we feel like that, we just try to remember why we started and what we will get if we don’t give up and work even harder.

What advice would you give anyone who wants to start an online business?

Always keep in mind things that stands you apart from others. Your rewards in life will always be in the exact proportion as your service.

Why are you studying business at Lewisham College? What do you plan to do next?

I am studying Business L3 year 1, because I want to know more about business and it also improves my English, because I’m from Moldova.

Lewisham College is, of course, very happy to place host to Andrei and Igor’s study.  The Head of Faculty for Business, Digital Skills and Performing Arts, Adu Antwi is proud of their achievements. “It’s wonderful to see two of our young students doing so well as online entrepreneurs,” he said. “I hope that Andrei and Igor will use their Level 3 Business course to develop their business even further.  I’m sure that we have a lot to learn from them as well!”

You can find out more about Andrei and Igor and their fitness journey on the social media channels below.

YouTube

Instagram 

Tiktok 

Official Website

Pictures by permission.

Lavatory Lovestory

It is said that some men lead lives of quiet desperation - and the same could be said of some women too.  I must say that the title of this Oscar nominated animated short film did put me off a little but I should not have worried that I was going to see something that I would have preferred not to.

It tells the story of a single, middle aged lady who works as a lavatory attendant.  To all intents and purposes it looks as if there is little else in her life but her mundane job and she longs for company.  Making matters worse, of course, is that she is surrounded by unavailable men for the duration of her working day.  Then, one day, she finds flowers in the jar that is used to collect the payment for using the facility.  Is her life about to change?

I never thought that the words toilet and charming would go together, but this really is.  Simply drawn in black and white (except for, well - you will see) this animated short film has pathos and humanity in buckets (and it has buckets too, believe me!).

It was created by the Melnitsa Animation Studio, which is based in St Petersburg in Russia.  You may know them for the animated feature film Little Longnose which was released in 2004. It was directed by Konstantin Bronzit and produced by Alexander Boyarsky and Sergey Selyakov.

Enjoy!

Dry Grass in a Blue Vase

For centuries a secret guild has kept a door locked, its secret hidden away for so long that no-one remembers what was kept behind it.   Now only one old woman remains out of the group and she decides to do the only thing she can before she dies.

This enigmatic and beautifully made animated short was written, directed, animated and sound edited by Maria Ivanova.

Turnikmen – Street Gymnastics – Ukraine Style

I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said that youth is wasted on the young. Well, not these boys, that’s for sure. I haven’t seen so much youthful joie de vivre on video for quite a while but I do have to add the caveat that I suspect these boys are all mad bonkers.

Many of the stunts that these boys pull off here will slacken your jaw. Setting the scene, both of these videos were shot in Ukraine. The first was taken at school #1 in the town of Sambir (whence SoN who shot this hails). 

The boys all identify as Turnikmen – street athletes who perform strength exercises of varying complexity in an outdoor setting.  They combine acrobatics and gymnastics using a conventional horizontal bar.   Some of the things that they do here look dangerous to say the least but it is done with such swagger and confidence that it makes you hold your breath but still believe in their ability to pull off yet another spectacular move. They did, however, have to learn how to perform these amazing moves.  I suspect their mother’s probably live in constant fear and expectation of another trip to the local hospital!

See what I mean about mad bonkers? As an educator in the UK, who teaches the age group depicted here I have to say that the management of my institution would have three fits and a faint if anything like this was attempted on site – health and safety regulations would simply not allow it. Yet here the bars and straps seem to have been provided by their school. Different strokes for different folks I guess!

The second video above is once more filmed in the Ukraine – from Sambir again but also the towns of Drogobych and Kalyniv.

Matrioska

Here is a blast from the past – created by the National Film Board of Canada in back in 1970.  As such you may have seen it before, or at least remember something like it! I certainly do, I would swear that I remember this as a filler between Saturday morning kids' shows when I was a child. The uncertainty, though, adds to the pleasure of this simple stop motion animation as if this is not why I remember it then I have no idea why it is so familiar!

The matrioska, or Russian Doll, is a tradition going back to 1890 when it was invented. The trick is to get as many hollow dolls as possible, one inside the other – it can be as many as you like, the only rule being that the number has to be odd.

This is a very cool animation. It may seem a little clunky to our eyes now, being over forty years old but I love the way that the dolls keep their Russian reserve throughout, even when the smallest one can’t quite get the steps right!

I Look and Move

This is very, very cleverly done - it has certainly foxed me when it comes to the techniques that have been used here but I suspect it involved ropes!

Animated by Constantine Konovalov and Irina Neustroeva and the team of Russian animation house teeter-totter-tam, this stop motion animation is about the people who make the world turn – in this case literally!

It takes the idea that although there are obstacles in our path and life is certainly not a movie we do possess what it takes to make ourselves and others happy and be the director of our own lives.

Or you could just simply see it as a very clever piece of stop motion animation! If you want to see how it was made, click here.

My Love

My Love is a 2006 paint-on-glass-animated short film directed by Aleksandr Petrov, based on A Love Story (1927) by Ivan Shmelyov. Work on the film took place in Yaroslavl, Russia over a period of three years at the studio DAGO Co. It was funded by Russia's Channel One and Dentsu Tec in Japan.

It is quite a breathtaking animation, using Petrov’s conventional technique of paint-on-glass, a very painstaking and time consuming technique (hence the reason it took three years to make) but it is also a very rewarding one, always a visual treat.

We do not usually feature animations much longer than five minutes on Kuriositas and My Love comes in at just under thirty minutes. However, it is a visual treat with a compelling story and hero.

My Love tells the story of Anton, in his sixteenth year and with his romantic and sexual inclinations awakening. He searches for his first love and finds himself presented with a choice. There is the household maid, his age and pretty, flirtatious and self evidently prepared to return his feelings. Then, there is the mysterious older woman with the blue spectacles who lives with a group of men next door.

Who will Anton choose and what will be the consequences of his actions?

Russian International News Agency Releases 100 Previously Unseen World War II Images

Children take shelter drawing an air raid, near Minsk, 1941, part of a largely unseen Russian archive. Now, the Russian International News Agency has an enormous archive of photographs spanning many decades, many of which have never been seen before.  It has recently committed to making part of this archive open to the public and to this end has started a project known as Eternal Values.

Above, citizens of Leningrad leave their houses after a particularly brutal bombing raid in 1942. This year the first batch (featuring Russia during the Second World War) was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons for the world to share. The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, uploaded one of the pictures to Wikimedia Commons himself.  It is hoped that many thousand more will join them in the near future.

A mechanic inspects a plane while a young soldier uses a stencil to add another kill star  to its side, taken on the southwestern front in 1942. This remarkable collection is now available to be used, copyright free, by anyone. Here, we present a cross section of these pictures which give an incredible insight in to a country in a state of total war.  Many more can be found here.

September 1941 and as the war progresses, universal conscription means that women as well as men must undergo military training. Here a group of new recruits march through the streets of Moscow.

April 1942 and Leningrad is under siege.  People must dispose of the bodies of their loved ones as best they can.

Yet despite the siege there must be some light hearted moments.  Here, sailors of the Baltic Fleet play with two year old Lucy, who had recently lost her parents in a bombardment.If Lucy is still alive she will be seventy years old.

In 1941 the whole country began to fully mobilise.  Hundreds of thousands of young men were expected to go away for their military training. Many would never return to their families.

Everyone, even the young, were expected to play their part. Here, teenage students at an industrial school make shells for the army in 1942.

A Yeremenko was a battalian commander in this war. Here he is shown leading his men in to battle.

The Ukraine was hit exceptionally hard by the German onslaught.  Here, in 1941, a bewildered old man sits in the ruins of his village - attacked and estroyed by the German army.

Each section of the Soviet military had a political department.  Here the head of that section within the Central Sniper School inspects the young women who have recently been through training on the eve of their departure for the front lines in 1943.

The Red Army on the March - September 1943. They would soon be on an offensive which would take them to the heart of Nazi power in Berlin.

Communication was a vital part of the war effort. On the 1st Byelorussian Front, 48th Army, 1944. The army's newspaper Slovo Boitsa correspondent First Lieutenant Zinoviy Shkapenyuk records a report of the Sovinformburo news agency.

Propaganda too played its part. Kazan Cathedral in Leningrad was used as a facade for these massive posters in October of 1941. The Great Patriotic War would be won at all and ay costs.

Training or in the case of the Voroshilov Regiment above, retraining, was often brief. Then it was off to war where life expectancy was very short.

Munkee on Moon

This is quite bizarre but captivating and something that I wanted to share to see what you think! It follows kid and munkee (no capitals!), created by United Urban Mowglis (a Russian website the purpose of which I cannot quite make out!), in their dream to reach the moon. It reminds me a little of the Gorillaz in its look and feel and it certainly caught my eye in terms of the use of animation and real film - it is very well done.

I am not entirely sure what the message is but I think it is something to do with wherever your imagination goes, you can follow. It is a lot of fun but also a little melancholy. What do you think?

Answers on a postcard please or, for speed, in the comments section below.

Lavatory Lovestory

It is said that some men lead lives of quiet desperation - and the same could be said of some women too.  I must say that the title of this Oscar nominated animated short film did put me off a little but I should not have worried that I was going to see something that I would have preferred not to.

It tells the story of a single, middle aged lady who works as a lavatory attendant.  To all intents and purposes it looks as if there is little else in her life but her mundane job and she longs for company.  Making matters worse, of course, is that she is surrounded by unavailable men for the duration of her working day.  Then, one day, she finds flowers in the jar that is used to collect the payment for using the facility.  Is her life about to change?

I never thought that the words toilet and charming would go together, but this really is.  Simply drawn in black and white (except for, well - you will see) this animated short film has pathos and humanity in buckets (and it has buckets too, believe me!).

It was created by the Melnitsa Animation Studio, which is based in St Petersburg in Russia.  You may know them for the animated feature film Little Longnose which was released in 2004. It was directed by Konstantin Bronzit and produced by Alexander Boyarsky and Sergey Selyakov.

Enjoy!

The Man Who Saved The World?

Take a look at the face in the picture.  It is a man you have possibly never heard of.  His name was Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov and he quite possibly saved your life or, if you were born after 1962, those of your parents, so enabling you to be born.  He personally stopped the launch of a nuclear weapon which could have led to Armageddon between the word’s then superpowers, the USA and the USSR.

What decision led this farm boy from a small farm near Moscow (which is many miles from any coast) to become a sailor is not recorded.  However, he spent a distinguished naval career mostly in submarines during the Cold War.

Arkhipov had already had one scrape with history before the events of 1962.  The year previously he had been second in command of a K-19 submarine, a Hotel class nuclear sub which was prone to problems.  On American Independence Day 1961 the sub was south of Greenland when an explosion almost disabled the submarine.  It was only the self-sacrifice of seven members of the crew which resulted in their deaths that stopped the submarine from blowing up.

These crew members managed to improvise a circuit which enabled the reactor to cool.

However, the submariners had been about to riot – in fear of their lives from radiation poisoning - and it was only the cool headedness of Arkhipov and his personal backing of the Captain that saved the sub from a mutiny.

This would have made most people ready and willing to head for the hills and never see the inside of a submarine again.  Not Arkhipov, however and this was just as well.  The following year he faced his moment of truth – one which had he not held his cool might have led to the end of civilisation as it was then known.

Image Credit Wikimedia

In the October of 1962 Arkhipov was again deputy commander of a sub carrying anti-ship nuclear torpedoes, this time the Hotel class ballistic missile submarine B-59.  The submarine was off the coast of Cuba and the Missile Crisis was at its peak.  The US had established a naval blockade of the communist island and Arkhipov's submarine (along with three others) was ordered to sneak through and help set up a secret submarine base there.

So began a deadly game of cat and mouse which involved US destroyers dropping depth charges to try and flush the submarines from the hidden reaches of the sea.  Arkhipov’s submarine was trapped by the aircraft Carrier USS Randolph and eleven US Navy Destroyers.  The depth charges they dropped were practice ones, with the intent of driving the submarine to the surface.

Such was the bombardment that finally Arkhipov’s submarine surfaced.  It returned to the USSR with its metaphorical tail between its legs.  Arkhipov continued in the service of the Soviet Navy, rising to the rank of Vice Admiral (below) and retired sometime in the mid 1990s.  He died in 1999.

Yet what was not discovered until years later were the activities on the submarine before it surfaced.   The Captain of the submarine, his nerves shot to pieces by the bombardment had ordered the assembly of one of the nuclear torpedoes and had been preparing to take a shot at one of the destroyers.

He believed that a war must have already started.

Moscow had left the decision to use one of these nukes with the captain of the submarine but with a proviso.  If he felt the need to use the weapon the next two officers in terms of rank had to agree to its use as well.  The political officer on board said yes.  The Executive Officer, Arkhipov, said no.

As such the shot that could have triggered a nuclear war never happened.  One can only imagine what the world might be like today if Arkhipov had been the third to utter ‘yes’ on that fateful day.

Transistor - Beauty is Individual

This really is very sweet.  We all have our own definitions of beauty and in the robot world that is no exception.  Here, a young droid on his first outing is experiencing the natural world and all of its wonder for the first time.  What will he find beautiful?  You may (or may not) be surprised.

The makers, Suponix, who are based in Russia put a lot of time and effort into this work -and it shows.  Their dream was to create an interesting main character, designing all the surrounding nature, and then modeling, visualizing and animating entire scene.We hope that you agree that they hit the nail (or should that be transistor?) on the head.