The Ultimate Space Race

A humorous 3D animated short film retelling the events of the space race between the USA and USSR from 1955 to 1969. Based on the actual timeline, the team at Ambient Press has elaborated, exaggerated, and introduced some delightfully strange twists to depict how these extraordinary events unfolded.  I have to say that I now feel even more sorry for Laika than I did when I first learned about how she went into space (and never came back).

FACTORY293

The Second World War is raging and in the blizzard struck hinterlands of the USSR Factory 293 is in trouble.  An inspection is due and the power has just gone out but that is just the start of the day’s difficulties for war-hero Grigori and his female workforce.

Written and directed by Roderick Mackay for Meaning Maker and Digital Media Arts, you may not believe this but FACTORY293 was filmed entirely in the much sunnier climes of Perth, Western Australia.  Yet although this is surprising in itself the strength of the film lies in its direction and the wonderful performances of the actors, particularly its stand-out leads Lizzie Schebesta and Myles Pollard.

Hitler’s Hospital: The Eerie Remains of Beelitz Sanatorium

In the last years of the nineteenth century the population of Berlin was expanding rapidly. The attendant issues of housing large numbers of people in cramped conditions were not far behind.  By 1898 the German National Insurance Institute had a sanatorium built for the victims of tuberculosis.  Beelitz-Heilstätten (or the Beelitz Sanitorium) steadily grew and functioned for many decades, playing host to a number of infamous patients, including Adolf Hitler. Yet most of it is now abandoned.

Image Credit Flickr User mr172

Image Credit Flickr User Harm Rhebergen

Although just a short distance from the German capital, the Beelitzer forest was considered suitable for a sanatorium as the area enjoyed fresh air and countryside.  However when the First World War broke out in 1914 it was not long before it was requisitioned and converted to care for the massive casualties inflicted at the front.  In the later months of 1916 a young soldier called Adolf Hitler was sent there to recuperate from a thigh injury acquired during the Battle of the Somme.

Mo‘ynaq – Graveyard of Ships in the Desert

Many have visited an abandoned city and wondered what catastrophic event could have caused such an exodus from a metropolis once so evidently thriving. Yet these cities are usually hundreds if not thousands of years old, the everyday clamor and cry of civilization just an echo. Visit Mo'ynaq in Uzbekistan, however, and you can see apocalypse right here, right now.

Image Credit Flickr User Martijn Munneke

The Soviet era sign still welcomes people to the city. Yet there are few visitors who stay more than a few hours. They all leave after they have done looking at what is reminiscent of a scene from a science fiction disaster movie - big ships adrift in the desert.

Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris

This is hugely clever, highly entertaining and extremely funny – and you don’t get that often, on or off the internet - and this one never gets old.  It is directed, animated, and edited by CHRIS LINCÉ and the music is supplied by Pig with the Face of a Boy.  In the space of just over six minutes you will get a précis of the entire history of the Soviet Union –all done to a marvelously melodic Tetris soundtrack.  What an unbeatable combination!

You will find yourself tapping your feet as the decades whiz by, from Lenin to Gorbachev and, as I did, wincing a little at the ironies of history.  Unsurprisingly, this short film has won two awards, both at the Super Shorts International Film Festival where it garnered the prizes for Best Animation and the Low Budget Award.

You may find yourself, as I did, watching it several times and catching something new on each repeated viewing.  Enjoy!

The Monastery Under The Lake

Image Credit Wikimedia

Take a trip up the Volga river in Russia and when you get to the small town of Kalyazin keep your eyes peeled for something unusual.  There, in the middle of an artificial lake stands something a little perplexing.  Is it a weird Russian form of lighthouse? Some weird folly built on an island?

Image Credit Flickr User Basykes

The answer is a resounding no.  During the 1940s the then Communist government had big plans to make the turbulent river navigable all year around.  So a cascade of dams and reservoirs was ordered on the Upper Volga.  It gave the region the much needed transport artery and hydroelectricity in to the bargain.  It also buried hundreds of years of history, of which the bell tower of the Makaryevsky Monastery is the only visible remnant above the waters of the Uglich reservoir.

Zoudov

The time, 1967.  Location – somewhere in the USSR.  A space launch is about to take place but a young female spy has intentions to stop the flight.  However, time and events may not be on her side.

This entertaining animated short by Clement Bolla takes us back to a time when the USSR and the USA were locked in the space race and this takes an amusing sideways glance at the behind the scenes shenanigans that no doubt were happening on both sides.  Together with a James Bond type sound track this makes an intriguing and engaging comedy spy thriller.

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.