Great post! I like how you included the two opposing reasons for why the Liubers might have been motivated to act the way they did. I would say it was more of a convenience thing; they wanted to make money, while also exerting their strength and power.
Month: April 2018
Comment on Stop 6: Chernobyl by Dalton Ragland
Very interesting post! Do you feel like the situation with Chernobyl is damaging the environment? Does this worry you that it may cause more problems with our climate down the road?
Comment on The Singing Revolution by Dalton Ragland
I enjoyed your post thoroughly; the Baltic states are full of interesting history. Do you think that these revolts against the Soviet Union helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? Did it fit a pattern that was occurring across Eastern …
Comment on The Godfather: Russian Edition by scmaclay
Really cool post! Was the Russian Mafia an extension of the black market or was it something entirely different? Has Putin’s crackdown on organized crime in Russia affected the oligarchs in any way, or have they been co-opted under Putin?
Comment on The Godfather: Russian Edition by Bree Taylor
Great post! I honestly didn’t know too much about the Russian Mafia, so your post was an awesome read. I wonder how citizens opinions varied about the Mafia regime compared to the previous one before the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Comment on We Have No Sex Here by Dalton Ragland
Your post was very interesting! Do you see any similarities between the prostitution situation in the Soviet Union and the prostitution situation in the United States? Are the reasons that these women turn to prostitution the same or different in both situations?
Comment on I’m Not Drunk, You’re Drunk! by ejrhodes5
I really like this post! I can’t imagine what would have happened if Gorbachev had tried an even more drastic reform, like complete prohibition of alcohol. That would have made for the historical event of the century.
Comment on The lads of Liubertsy by ejrhodes5
What an interesting post! I’d never heard about this group before reading this. It’s really funny that they liked Sylvester Stallone so much, since he was a such a classic American symbol. Even if you hate America, you’ve gotta love Rocky.
Comment on AIDS and the “high-risk” group. by ejrhodes5
I also wrote about the Soviet response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I wrote two research papers on HIV/AIDS last semester, one on its history in the U.S., and one on the present epidemic in Russia. It’s really sad that people continue to think of it as a disease that people “deserve,” and that it went ignored by most of America for the first decade of the epidemic. The stigma in Russia today is especially bad, and it’s caused their number of new cases to increase rapidly each year. Why do you think the stigma persists despite the wealth of information that disproves most of people’s concerns?
Comment on All the Lies We Cannot See: Operation Infektion and HIV/AIDS in the Soviet Union by ejrhodes5
Thank you! I was also thinking about the parallels between this disinformation campaign and the ones we hear about today – it seems like Russia is a little more blatant about today than the KGB was back then. Last semester I was researching the HIV/AIDS epidemic in contemporary Russia – it started to get really bad there in the 90s, and the epidemic persists today. A lot of the epidemic in Russia is fueled by drug addiction, and it doesn’t help that they are very close the world’s biggest producer of opium (Afghanistan). The main issue is that there is a really harsh stigma towards those with HIV/AIDS and that the government refuses to acknowledge the epidemic.
