Digest: Google Alert - Stalin

Murmurs of Soviet nostalgia in Russia - but who is feeling it? Putin certainly is reaching for the weight of the old state - in the aesthetic realm as well as the political. On March 24, the Telegraph observed that monumental Soviet architecture is making a state-sponsored comeback in the design for a national cemetery. (Wax Lenin may finally go underground... I'm loth to say "get a decent burial.") True to, er, form, the new design embodies the Soviet style, daunting the tiny beholder with (as Ryszard Kapuściński put it in his Imperium notes on the new Moscow) "triumph, power, monumentality, might, seriousness, massiveness, [and] invincibility."

The Hartford Courant just wrote that Yale University will be adding a Stalin-centered digital archive to their online Annals of of Communism. Variety reports that Montefiore's Young Stalin is being made into a movie.

In the St. Petersburg Times, a review of a compendium of Soviet propaganda. (And I've added Great Stalinist Photographic Books to my Amazon.com wish list. 1 copy, imported, presently available - for $159.)

Some veteran's groups are re-remembering Stalin - fixing up old monuments and requesting new ones.

In an unsavory twist on the post-Soviet stand-by question of how democracy would change the former empire, the BBC posits that the question to ask of Russia these days is "not how democracy has changed Russia, but how Russia - eternal, enduring, long-suffering - is changing democracy."

This website has some gorgeous photographs from the real Russian underground.

The Stalin Subway Shooter: a first person shooter set in Moscow, 1952. Gamers can look forward to:

• Real Moscow locations: Moscow subway stations, Kremlin, Moscow State University
• Secret locations: D6 - secret military subway under Moscow, secret laboratories, underground shelters, Stalin's bunker
• Authentic weapons, including rare weapons like anti-tank rifle PTRS-41
• More than 300 destructible environment objects: from furniture and cases to the ashtrays and knobs