Last updates: 2025-06-29: I got access to the transcription of Lina Prokofiev’s interview to Harvey Sachs, which Morrison uses as part of evidence of Prokofiev’s supposed travel ban. The section on Prokofiev’s Travel Ban was expanded and, since now it’s clear that Morrison’s evidence is very weak, I changed the final conclusions. 2025-06-22: Completed the Analysis of Atovmyan’s memoirs from Ryadom s velikimi. The section on Atovmyan’s memoirs was expanded and reviewed....
In my PhD thesis, I conducted a content analysis of 13 books specializing in the history of Soviet music. For each book, I examined its responses to a set of key historical questions, including: Why were the ASM (Association for Contemporary Music) and RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians) dissolved in 1932? Why did Prokofiev return to the USSR in 1936? Why was Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk censored, while Dzerzhinsky’s Quiet Flows the Don was praised?...
My wife gave me this awesome electric egg boiler in Christmas 2021. It’s very simple: add some water to the plate, add the eggs using the support, cover it, turn it on, and wait. The boiler will heat the water and turn off automatically when the water finishes evaporating. It’s just a thermal switch: it turns off because the plate gets hotter once the water is not there anymore. The problem is that although it turns off, it doesn’t flip the on/off switch, like, say, those electric kettles....