Coming soon to a strip mall near you, the latest fad in retro restaurants: it's the CCCP Club. Actually I'm not sure if that was the actual name or not, but the establishment that we dined at tonight in Chelyabinsk (pronounced "Chel-YAH-binsk") was exactly that, a kitschy look back at the good ol' days of the USSR. Pictures of stone-faced Politburo members along with portraits of Lenin and Marx and their books shared space with Soviet propaganda art from the Thirties, including a replica mural of the happy and progressive people striding forward together that took up an entire wall.
It was all a little creepy when you consider the horrors and brutality of the Soviet era. Maybe since Uncle Joe seems to have been airbrushed from history--at least as portrayed at this restaurant--it's okay to have a little harmless nostalgia for that period of Russia's past Still, it would be impossible to imagine such a place existing in today's Germany with decor from the glory days of Nazism. It shows the confused and conflicted views that Russia continues to have with its past. Russia has moved beyond the days of the USSR and I doubt if most Russians would ever want to return to that time. But yet, they aren't ready to completely repudiate that period either and face up to the truth about what the Soviet Union really was.
No comments:
Post a Comment