Life Imitates Mel Brooks

Life imitates Mel Brooks: more cullings from Richard Overy, The Dictators (2004)

• “So anxious were [planners] to match [Stalin’s] vision … that the huge Moskva Hotel, built with the same over-high classical portico found on the designs for Berlin, was constructed with two wings of completely different styles because Stalin had mistakenly approved as a single design tweo separate submissions placed on a table in front of him.” (223)

• Stalin’s “favorite film was said to be the 1938 production of V olga! Volga! a musical comedy that ends with the triumphant completion of the Moscow-Volga canal by regiments of prisoner-labourers …” (238)

• There were 34 assassination attempts against Hitler, none against Stalin (though plenty of people wanted to). “Lenin was the victim of two attempts on his life. Many years later, a man was caught in the Lenin mausoleum trying to shoot the embalmed corpse.” (326)

• Those émigré Russians who try to be Nazis? Evidently the mustache was part of the rigging: “each [was] comically adorned with Hitler’s familiar toothbrush mustache and a uniform like that of a railway guard…” (336)

• Builders of a superblock at Magnitogorsk, the “new industrial city” forgot to include a sewer system (228). [I seem to recall reading about the same problem with a new barracks built by the Austrian Empire in the 1890s…]