Ukraine List

So elections are coming up in Ukraine and the one I am going to be watching is the local election on Serpent Island in the Black Sea. In an attempt to give the island a more substantial status (a democratic one), Ukraine’s Vice Premier, Aleksandr Kuzmuk, announced that there would be local elections on the […]

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I saw this photo recently come over Flickr, and I thought it was a really great shot of Kamianets Podiliskyi. You can see the top of the fortress in the back and the Turkish bridge leading up to the fortification. The framing and perspective are beautiful, and it was taken by Alexander Kidalov. You can […]

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“If it is necessary to choose between truth and beauty, I’ll choose beauty.” — Olexandr Dovzhenko
I’ve recently been intrigued by the Ukrainian filmmaker, Olexandr Dovzhenko. He was active from the 1920s into the 1940s and is often grouped in the trio of great Soviet filmmakers along with Eisenstein and Pudovkin. The most known of Dovzhenko’s […]

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I ran into a few images this week that I found interesting. The first one is a Soviet propaganda poster from 1930. It says, “Let’s annihilate the kulak’s class.” The image came from plakaty.ru which has a very nice collection of Russian propaganda posters.

By the way, this article written by Lynne Viola is an interesting […]

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Both English Russia and Carpetblogger recently highlighted the color photos of the Russian Empire from the early 1900s taken by the photographer, Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky. He used a technique of taking photo plates utilizing red, green, and blue filters, and by recombining these plates, a color image can be wonderfully reproduced. In his day, he used […]

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In a recent post, I noted that the Ukrainians and Romanians opened a new frontier bridge between the two countries. It was a good mark of cooperation, but one issue that had to be pushed to the background was the current dispute about Serpent Island (Острів Зміїний in Ukrainian). I usually find international boundary and […]

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In a recent post I covered the opening of a bridge between Romania and Ukraine, so I thought I would do a follow-up post on the Ukrainian town of Solotvyno, which is a well-known salt mining town. Actually, the town’s name is derived from the Ukrainian word for “salt” and salt has been in its […]

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In mid-January, the new bridge between Solotvino, Ukraine and Sighet, Romania officially opened with Victor Yushchenko and the President of Romania, Traian Basescu, on hand for the ceremony.
The original bridge over the Tysa River was built when the area belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it was later destroyed by the Germans during World War […]

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