Icons and Cockroaches

  I pretend to be obsessed with Russian history and social movements, but this volume has been sitting on my shelf for the past year and I still haven't gotten through all of it. When I first started reading about 90's Russia, National Bolshevism, and nationalist movements in general this was exactly the sort of book I wished existed and now it does. Some of Adam Curtis' journalism touches on some of the themes here as well, which for me boil down to: Russian politics are so much more interesting than ours. Not to live through ( though from where I live we seem to be inching our way towards a softer version of 90's Russia which might not be totally fair since I live in Buffalo) but as a political environment to study. For all of our fringe political thinkers and movements, nothing outside of the competition between the boring center right and the boring center left has any depth. We don't have intellectuals forming post-modern extremist movements based on self consc

I've been meaning to write about 15 book reviews on here, mostly so I don't have to force people I know to listen to my opinions on books and people they couldn't possibly care less about. Less ambitiously, here is what I been reading: The three Russian criminal tattoo books put out by Fuel. As I get older I am more and more inclined to buy books that are mostly pictures, and these are the perfect mix of scholarly introductions (not too long and never boring) and photographs about a world I'll never come anywhere near. This world is the antithesis of America's world of "body art", where every provincial has dozens of meaningless ugly tattoos all over themselves. For some reason I think the KPRF and it's history are interesting. Maybe it's because American Communists are just so boring and awful, with a history of either being stooges or (after 1991)  generic lefties who think voting for Social Democratic parties is too extreme . I also suspect I am