Deep-Sixing Boredom

Meet Morskoi Boi, the Soviet Union’s first successful experiment in fun simulation

The Many Lives of LOMO

This issue’s icon: the people’s camera

Avos. “Perhaps.” “God willing.” “Hope against hope.” Pushkin baptized his fellow Slavs with this very phrase in Eugene Onegin: “Perhaps, o people's Shibboleth…” In Goncharov’s Oblomov, the spineless protagonist can barely splutter a sentence without its invocation: “And perhaps Zahar will contrive something…let's hope they'll manage without turning me out…well, things will be arranged somehow!" It is said that few words characterize the Russian outlook as succinctly as avos—a compact expression of the belief that, against all reason, something good might still turn up. So it should come as no surprise that the word eventually morphed into the avoska—the USSR’s portable, fishnet shopping sack.

In the USSR, there was one floral scent which could be called the scent of success: the scent of Krasnaya Moskva - "Red Moscow," the perfume favored by the Kremlin wives and the country's lucrative Communist party elite. Let's take a whiff of its flowery past.

Though making an ass out of yourself on the internet is not culturally exclusive, let's gander at the Slavic strain of the phenomena, distinguished by a joyous lack of judgement, heavy abuse of photoshop, and an abundance of wall carpets.