A wonderful article about my Playground of the Autocrats Russian history triptychs was published in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of Terrain.org, A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments. It boasts lots of images and even audio recordings of the original lyrics I wrote to the tune of Kalinka, probably the most popular folksong in Russia.
There are separate hypertext selections about each of my triptychs:
Most Exposed Terrain on Earth: Portraying Human Vulnerability on the Endless Steppes
Home Security At Any Crazy Price: What If We Had a 9/11 Every Year For Centuries?
Dress It Up in Resplendent Clothes: Stalin Builds on the Flatlands Past
… and other sections about the vast Russian flatland (steppes), which made the Muscovite state vulnerable to Mongol invasions and the massive trade in Slavic slaves, giving rise to a garrison state:
Landscape Form and Military Defense
Mongol Occupation and the Slav Slave Trade: the “Harvesting of the Steppe”
While you’re there, please check out all the other great articles in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of Terrain.org, whose editor-in-chief is Simmons Buntin. Terrain is, in the words of its wonderful About page,
a twice yearly online journal searching for that interface—the integration—among the built and natural environments that might be called the soul of place.
It is … a celebration of the symbiosis between the built and natural environments where it exists, and an examination and discourse where it does not.
The literary, journalistic, and artistic works contained with Terrain.org are of the highest quality, submitted by a variety of contributors for a diverse audience, including some of the finest material previously appearing in Terra Nova: Nature & Culture. The works may be idealistic, technical, historical, philosophical, and more. Above all, they focus on the environments around us—the built and natural environments—that both affect and are affected by the human species.
Terrain.org strives to be both a resource and a pleasure, a compass and a shelter…
