Опасные советские вещи: Городские легенды и страхи в СССР

Before ordering, please inquire about the availability of this copy. Jeans infested with lice, larvae under the skin of an African guest, a portrait of Mao Zedong showing through at night on a Chinese carpet, swastikas hidden in the construction of houses, chewing gum with crushed glass - this is an incomplete list of Soviet urban legends about dangerous things. The book by well-known folklorists and anthropologists A. Arkhipova (RANEPA, Russian State University for the Humanities, NES) and A. Kirzyuk (RANGHiGS) is the first anthropological and folklore study dedicated to the fears of the Soviet people. Many of them found expression in texts and practices obscure to our contemporary: in the 1930s, people looked for Trotsky’s profile on a matchbox, and in the 1970s, rumors were passed about treats poisoned by Americans. .The book explains why such fears arose, how they turned into rumors and urban legends, how they influenced the behavior of the Soviet people and sometimes gave rise to large-scale moral panics. The study is based on survey data, interviews, memoirs, diaries and archival documents. Excerpt: In the 1930s, the pioneer tie did not have to be painfully tied with a special knot. To do this, the schoolchildren had special metal clips, which depicted a burning fire with three flames. In November 1937 schools in Moscow and Leningrad were struck by an epidemic of rumors about the dangers of these clamps. In the engraving with the image of the flame, schoolchildren and adults saw the ubiquitous "Trotsky's beard", his profile, as well as the signature of the villainous opposition: If you turn the icon upside down, three flames form the letter T, which means Trotskyist. If you turn it sideways, the same flames turn out to be the letter Z - Zinoviev. And if you look at the picture directly, you get the letter W - a gang. This means that the enemies depicted their symbol on it: the Trotskyist-Zinoviev gang. (from the book "Dangerous Soviet things", UFO, 2020)