I am happy to announce that Russian language and Chinese language versions of my personal website have finally gone live.

If you read one or other of these languages, please give them a look.

To commemorate this achievement, I have included some stirring and (unintentionally?) homoerotic Soviet-era propaganda posters promoting Soviet-Chinese bilateral cooperation. The featured image for this blog post reads “Friendship Forever for the Happiness of the People!” It was painted by master artist Mikhail Mikhailovich Solov’ev in 1953.

The book pages they are holding open loosely translate to: “May the unbreakable brotherly friendship and close cooperation of the Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s Republic grow and flourish for the benefit of the peoples of our countries, in the name of strengthening peace and international security.”

The second poster below (which is also remarkable for its homoeroticism—Socialist Realism must have had a consistent design brief) says “Always Together!” and was painted by Leonid Fedorovich Golovanov in 1958.

For some serious discussion on these fascinating and fun posters, see the article “Forward to the great aim!”: the image of the USSR and China in propaganda posters of 1940–1960s by Egor A. Fedosov (2017). Note the article is in Russian. 

I am still figuring out how I will coordinate the Russian and Chinese sides in terms of blog posts and other materials. However, a trilingual website is a goal I’ve had for years. I’m very happy it’s finally up and running.

The two sides are essentially copies of this English language version. Although, I haven’t translated every little thing from the English side.

You’ll notice the language switcher in the top right-hand corner. These switch directly between the three languages for whatever page you’re on (except for blog posts—these take a long time to write, so I’m not translating them yet).

Thanks so much for your time.