Golubkin
Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 12:26PM I've decided to devote a post to a Soviet cartoon character that I discovered a few years ago, and did some research on. This character has an amazingly rich cultural history (that actually continues today), and deserves more attention from the international community.
As many of you know, I lived in Moscow for a year, after I graduated from college.
One of my favorite places in Moscow was a huge underground market called “podzemlianniki” which was located inside an old abandoned metro station.
My favorite booth was full of vintage Soviet toys. I went a few times, and picked up a small collection. I lost a lot of these toys when I moved back to the states; the package that I sent from Moscow never arrived in Illinois.
I went to this booth so many times that I became friendly with the shopkeeper, an old woman named Margarita Mikhailovna. One weekend, she surprised me with a small brown bag that had my name on it. She whispered “this toy is especially for you.” And then winked at me. I had no idea what she meant. I probably assumed that it was going to be some dumb “American” themed toy. But then she showed it to me.
It was a small plush figurine with a molded plastic head. I asked her what it was and she was totally surprised. She said: “what do you mean? But of course this is Golubkin.” Then she started singing a song. I found a recording of this song, which you can listen to here.
I had heard this song before, but I had never listened to the lyrics carefully. The central refrain is:
Все выше, и выше, и выше
Стремим мы полет за радуг,
Голубкин из космоса дышит
Он будет наш голубой друг...
Which translates roughly as:
Let’s go higher, higher, and higher.
We’ll strive to fly past the rainbow
For Golubkin whispers from the Cosmos
That he wants to be our blue-skinned friend.
This translation needs a little explanation. The character’s name is “Golubkin” which derives from the word for “blue,” so his name and skin-color are almost the same word.
The other thing that’s important to know is that this same word, “Goluboi” is one of the accepted colloquial terms for a gay male. So the idea of this little blue-skinned alien cosmonaut wanting to be my “goluboi friend” or “gay friend” was really funny to me. I bought the doll and brought it home to do some research.
Poster for “The Sixth International Cosmos Day.” April, 1967. (Artist: B. Lebedev).
Searching for Golubkin online, I discovered an enormous collection of posters and references, but only through Russian google. As far as I could tell, nothing about Golubkin had ever been translated into English.
From what I could understand, Golubkin was created for propaganda posters in the late 60s, a sort of cutesy cosmonaut who could be the alien counterpart to Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. I think Golubkin’s creators were also looking for an ideologically correct character that they could make cartoons with. Soviet animation was taken very seriously, but even in the Brezhnev years, it was hard to get approval for new cartoon characters. Most creators were recycling old material.
This little welcoming alien had an instant cult success, but he never really stuck in the nostalgic memories of the time. It may have been because of his weird appearance, or the fact that he wasn’t technically “Russian,” I don’t know.
Illustration from “Golubkin Priletaet v Kosmos.” DETGIZ, 1970. (Artist: I. Kratkaya).
Poster for “The Twelfth International Cosmos Day.” April, 1973. (Artist: N. Simonov).
Poster for “Golubkin Day.” June, 1979. (Artist: K. Lebedev).
Motif for “The Moscow Institute for the Study of the Cosmos.” 1983. (Artist: A. Voronin).
I never solved the mystery of why Margarita Mikhailovna had selected the toy especially for me. That is…until last weekend, when I was trying to assemble this presentation. That’s when I stumbled across this poster on the internet:
This was released in May 2009, a few months before I went to Russia. It was put out by a GLBT rights group called AKTSIIA, which was foremost in advocating for a Moscow Pride Parade. The government banned the parade, but AKTSIIA threw a demonstration anyways.
The demonstration actually used the motto from the Golubkin song “я ваш голубой друг,” which, in this case, clearly meant “I am your gay friend.” The demonstrators also held posters of Golubkin, along with more standard iconography such as rainbow flags and banners reading “gay equality—no compromise.” Unfortunately, the protestors were arrested and violently detained by the riot police within minutes of starting the demonstration.
According to one of the organizers, Nikolai Aleksandrov, the riot police were “needlessly violent”, and even smashed his face to the pavement as he shouted “Golubkin Forever!” In a little twist of irony, the riot police in Russia is called OMON, which, in cyrillic letters looks like this:
Every time I see this…I think about what it would look like in a mirror.
I'd like to imagine that Margarita Mikhailovna had this political re-tooling of Golubkin in mind when she set aside the doll for me. I cannot be certain. Either way, though, I am very eager to see where the Golubkin legacy leads us next! Let me close this post with a final nod to this forgotten Soviet character and its historical legacy: Golubkin Forever!
Blast From The Past
Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 08:48AM (This one is from May, 2010, when I was living in Moscow, Russia).
Untranslatable: kasha (“porridge”)
During the celebrations of May 1st, when I rallied with the Communist party through central Moscow, an exchange took place with an older woman clutching a small poster of Stalin. My friend Sean wanted to take her picture. She was happy to oblige and encouraged him to continue his support of the Communist party on our side of the Atlantic. Or, as she apparently put it, American Communists need to “stir up the kasha.”
I have not been able to get this expression out of my mind. It’s charming, catchy, but also thought-worthy and useful. Let me explain. Kasha is basically the same thing as “porridge.” It is made simply, out of grains cooked in water or milk, and then enriched with butter, sugar, honey, nuts, jam, or fruit. It can be made of wheat, oats, millet, buckwheat, and is usually served for breakfast [although salty versions exist to accompany meat and cabbage.]
Like “porridge,” or the older American word “mush,” kasha is also used in a number of metaphorical expressions—indicating everything from stupidity and forgetfulness [kasha in my head, like “mush for brains”] to the state of a body that’s been beaten up [turned into kasha, like “beaten to a pulp”]. Indeed, when I visualize a bubbling pot of kasha—beige, gloopy, hot—I can appreciate the power of the metaphor. Kasha is a uniform mass, reduced through pretty un-delicate cooking into a nourishing (but distinctly “vulgar”) mix of ingredients that are no longer distinguishable.
It’s soft and mushy. It has no form. It’s basic, neutral food. It is one of the cheapest, most fundamental and ancient dishes of today’s Russian cuisine—popular among old and young alike, among the rich and the poor. Every stolovaya [“cafeteria”] ladles kasha in the morning for a few coins, and many upscale restaurants decorate it with strawberries and pistachios as part of a “business breakfast” for upwards of 150 rubles.
When I hear stir up the kasha, a number of impressions come to mind. Primarily, I think of the consequences of not stirring the kasha. Left on a flame, kasha would burn on the bottom, stick to the sides of the pot, and would ultimately be inedible. Simple stirring is all that kasha requires to be turned into tasty food. Why wouldn’t you stir?
Perhaps the metaphor translates as follows—society, too is a mix of elements on fire. So it’s kasha whether you like it or not. In order to make it cook into something healthy (and not start a fire or a disgusting mess) all you have to do is “put a spoon in the mix and give it a few stirs,” making sure all the elements are mixed equally, face the heat equally, and rest on the surface equally. Communism promises just this [its effectiveness at delivering is another story]: simple, nourishing unity through diverse and equal labor. All it needs is some passion, intentionality, and a few good stirrers with spoons—in short: smart and dynamic organization.
Let’s imagine that all political systems or social experiments could be talked about with these culinary metaphors. Maybe England could be scones and clotted cream—complex and slow cooking pastries [parliament] decorated with pure fat [royalty]. America could be cupcakes—flavorless and generic pastry [democracy] made with too much white flour [ha, ha], and then decorated (and made to look more exciting and diverse) with saccharine frosting [media]. This list should be extended [with a sense of humor, ideally, not extreme reductivism…] China? Iraq? Soviet Communism should have been a perfect kasha but it went wrong. It wasn’t stirred right, and the proportions were off. Russia today has taken the leftovers of this failed kasha and tried to bake it into a cake [appropriately, Russian desserts often use leftover bread-products as a base]. They’ve baked the kasha mush into cake-layers, smeared them with frosting and whipped sour-cream, and decorated them with bits of imported canned pineapple and some nuts [I’ve just described one of the most popular, common cakes in Moscow]. The only thing that’s nourishing in this cake is the bunch of almonds buried in the sour cream [imported, like all Moscow nuts, from Central Asia]. It’s a poorly- and irresponsibly-made cake. Far better would be to fix the proportions on the kasha recipe and give good old socialism another stir…or perhaps now that we have all these healthful almonds, we could use them?...
