Friday, May 20, 2011

Neo-Nazi Russian Olympics Billboards?


(click images) The Olympic-themed Moscow boards are actually for Gorky Gorod, a luxury housing complex near Sochi, site of the 2014 Winter Games. Some locals are none too pleased with the "neo-Hitlerite," "fascist" blond-haired blue-eyed imagery that's "like something from a Leni Riefenstahl film."
I'm sure swarthy-skinned Joseph Stalin would have been appalled. The billboards were created by Doping-Pong, a St. Petersburg design firm that uses a *ahem* Swastika as one of its online banners. Dmitry Leshchinsky, creative director of the firm, had this to say about the project:
"Any association with fascism is very unpleasant to us, and the opinions and methods of several 'critics' provoke exactly those kinds of associations. The publishing of disgusting labels and the promotion of 'pasquinades' in the media; destroying and pouring dirt on everything that stands out, even by the smallest margin, from the grey mass of advertising: that is real fascism, in my opinion."
Read the Guardian piece for more choice quotes. Second image via Animal NY.

5 Comments:

Blogger Bagryan said...

Not neo-nazi, but neo-commi. The stilistics are similar.

8:53 AM  
Blogger ANI said...

I second Bagryan - it's very 1930s Communist propaganda, which really wasn't very different from Leni Rifenstahl's films, but with slightly different ideology behind it...I personally would not want to live in a development that advertises itself as harkening to those ideals, but I am sure many people would.

9:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

FEMEN didn't show up because they live in a different country.

3:28 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Agree with the others - this is obviously more a reference to USSR-style posters. I'm surprised the design firm didn't try to justify it with that.

2:57 AM  
Anonymous azi said...

the two statues in the back are doing the Sieg Heil

8:20 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home