May 12, 2021

A Monument to The Alien


A Monument to The Alien
Well, it certainly beats all those identical Lenin statues every Russian city seems to have.   VKontakte

Continuing our coverage of unusual, strange, or incredible Russian statues and monuments, we present the monument to the alien from  Ridley Scott's (fittingly titled) 1979 sci-fi horror film, Alien.  

This nightmare of a monument lives in Kurgan, at the Central Park of Culture and Relaxation (because what's more relaxing than an incredibly life-like alien with acid for blood?) We can only imagine a poor child's reaction to a character straight out of a rated-R movie popping up in their favorite park. 

A local masterclass group studying forgery design generously donated the sculpture to the park. This wasn't their first donation: in 2020, they created a monstrous-looking iron sculpture of a horse and placed it near a busy street, which nearly scared motorists to death. 

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Survival Russian is an intensely practical guide to conversational, colloquial and culture-rich Russian. It uses humor, current events and thematically-driven essays to deepen readers’ understanding of Russian language and culture. This enlarged Second Edition of Survival Russian includes over 90 essays and illuminates over 2000 invaluable Russian phrases and words.

Marooned in Moscow
May 01, 2011

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.

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