Theory and practice of popular Soviet magazines
For a long time, squares depicting various equipment became the hallmark of the cover of the Soviet magazine “Modelist-Constructor”. Looking at them, you could immediately tell what the issue of the magazine would be about. It was convenient...
“I see that you were not alien
Soviet magazines “Technology of Youth”,
“Model designer”, “Young technician”,
“Science and Life” and you knew
how to connect two metal parts
using a soldering iron..."
ROSS 42 (Yuri Vasilievich)
Soviet magazines “Technology of Youth”,
“Model designer”, “Young technician”,
“Science and Life” and you knew
how to connect two metal parts
using a soldering iron..."
ROSS 42 (Yuri Vasilievich)
Memories of times gone by. Previous articles in this series have already discussed the benefits that Soviet popular science magazines brought. But here’s how they helped and how specifically, everyone’s experience here probably was different. They helped some more, others less, although in any case they played a positive role.
It just so happened that I inherited from relatives who moved to another city a whole bunch of magazines “Technology for Youth”, “Young Technician” and “Young Naturalist” from the very end of the 50s. And although I myself did not read anything until 1962, even looking at the illustrations in them I received great pleasure. My grandfather also subscribed to the magazine Ogonyok. And it so happened that in one of them there was a photograph of Cuban soldiers with Czech ZB machine guns with a magazine in the pistol grip.
In the magazine “Technology for Youth” No. 6 for 1957, Ivan Efremov’s novel “The Andromeda Nebula” began to be published. And although this magazine itself fell into my hands only around the fall of 1963, it did not become any more interesting!
And we, the boys from Proletarskaya Street, at that time had cinema and television as our main source of information. But its homemade weapon they did it based on what they saw there. That is, “a German machine gun with a handle and a stick,” “a Russian machine gun with a disk.”
And then suddenly I show up for another “war” with a machine gun with “one stick.” “It doesn’t happen like that!” – the “two-stick” and “drummers” immediately shouted and... I, with jubilation in my soul, took them to my yard and brought out to the porch a magazine with this color photo.
As they say, there is no trick against scrap. The guys had to come to terms with my “Cuban machine gun”!
The continuation of "Nebula..." the novel "The Hour of the Ox" also saw the light on the pages of "Technology for Youth", No. 11 - 1968.
In 1964, I looked through all the old magazines, read them all and asked my mother to write me “U-T”, then I myself started buying the magazines “Modelist-constructor”, “Horizons of technology for children” (Polish), “Small modeling” at the newsstand. ”(Polish), and somewhere in 1968 I was already prescribed “Technology for Youth”.
The same issue published material about UFOs...
The most interesting thing is that I really liked the images and descriptions of the homemade products there, but... I almost didn’t even try to repeat one of them. All the time I was missing something for this. Either there were no suitable materials, or the tools were “wrong”. In a word, the situation with this magazine was like this: the eye sees, but the tooth is numb.
The Moscow television program “One Hundred Ideas of Two Friends” was completely within my capabilities. And a camera made from a matchbox, and models of ships, again, from matchboxes covered with colored paper - all this was made, and more than once.
Even the airplane “Ilya Muromets” was made from matchboxes, and what’s more, it was all covered with “silver papers” from chocolates. The wing struts were made of matches, so in general it was a homemade game for the game, although “this,” of course, could not be called a model.
But it cannot be said that “Young Technician” did not bring me any concrete, practical benefit. He brought some more!
I really liked the drawings and photographs of homemade products that were published on the pages of UT. I always dreamed of making the same ones. But... I didn’t. Something was always in the way! This kind of stationary rocket was described in issue 4 of 1965...
And it so happened that in issue 4 of 1965 I read about how to make a hydraulic examiner. Here it is - on the page from this magazine below...
Continuation of the story about the “examiner”
I remember that this material simply struck my imagination painfully, and I wanted to do it, but... for some reason I didn’t do it.
And so many years passed, I found myself working in a rural school and in 1978 I remembered this material. And based on this development, he made his own “electronic examiner”. It had five question columns, each with five questions. Five colored light bulbs corresponded to ratings from 1 to 5. You had to choose one correct answer among 5.
We started using it in class stories, physics, foreign language. I wrote about him to the local regional newspaper, then to the regional one, then to Sovetskaya Rossiya.
Well, of course, when I was accepted into the party, this also counted for me. So this article in UT brought me obvious and undoubted benefit!
A very interesting story by Andrzej Czechowicz “The Truth about Electra” was also published in “UT” number 3 for 1967, page 38
In the magazine "Technology-Youth" only once were paper patterns for making a model given tank T-28. It is not clear by what miracle they were brought to his pages, but that’s how it happened. Although only once.
And again, I didn’t make it, but I used the projections of the historical series when in 1980 I made a model of the “Freedom Fighter” tank for the All-Union competition for the best toy. After all, the model got third place there. And a bonus of 150 rubles.
But this magazine was for me an inexhaustible source of information about... aliens from outer space. “Baalbek Veranda” and “Nazca Plateau” – I literally devoured all the articles from the “Anthology of Mysterious Cases”. And what’s more, he cut it out and hemmed it.
As a result, I accumulated materials for an interesting lecture, which I began to give through the OK Komsomol in the summer of 1975. And I didn’t invent anything! Everything that was discussed was published in the journal of the Komsomol Central Committee, and the printed word was highly respected in the USSR.
The only thing I allowed myself to do was answer the question of where these aliens are now. When they asked me about this, I answered in a sepulchral voice: “We are still flying back!”
However, such a meticulous collection of material on the topic played a nasty joke on me.
I noticed that the number of contacts with aliens from outer space is growing every year, but they are all somehow strange, and the aliens themselves are incredibly different and there are practically no two identical among them. That is, one might think that we have a whole herd of them grazing from all over the Galaxy, which, of course, simply cannot be. And if so, then all this is bullshit. As a result, I lost faith in aliens and never read any more lectures about them.
Articles like this, for example, could easily be taken from there, retold in your own words close to the text - here you have a finished lecture!
An article about prehistoric aliens on Earth...
But again, “T-M” was very useful to me in a rural school.
It was necessary to design a class. But as? How? So I came up with the idea of cutting up the historical series “T-M”, dedicated to Soviet tractors, and making a stand based on these illustrations. And he turned out to be more than appropriate, and he made everyone visiting and inspecting very happy. That is, it seems like a small thing, but it’s nice.
I really wanted to take part in the “Cosmos” competition, which “Modeler-Constructor” wrote about constantly. And... when I started working for OblSYUT, I succeeded!
The magazine “Modelist-Constructor” - what practical use did it have other than informing?
I bought the first issue and... immediately began making a model of the glider, the drawings of which were given there. And it seemed simple, but I never managed to do it.
The first issue of “Modelist” I purchased was literally read to the gills!
But it became the first magazine where my article was published. The second... The first was not published.
It was dedicated to models of ships made of plasticine. The fact is that in the 10th grade, together with one of my friends, I made almost meter-long models of plasticine ships, and we had a battle with them on the river. One imitated the battleship Queen Elizabeth, the other imitated the Bismarck. We shot at them from a cannon turned on a lathe with balls from bearings (these were shells) and torpedoes (pencils).
The “battle” was very interesting, recorded on film, and ended with the explosion of the “powder magazines” on the “Bismarck”, which as a result sank. And then my young wife saw this ship in the entryway of our old house, she was very surprised that it was made of plasticine, and... she was the first to suggest that I write about it in M-K. And I dictated the text to her, and she rewrote it in a very clear handwriting. But... it was necessary to reprint it, but it didn’t occur to us. They attached a photo, I drew diagrams and manufacturing technology.
I was told that “the article has been submitted to the reviewer,” and that was the end of it. This is how my attempt in 1975 failed. But the attempt was successful in 1980...
Well, then a whole series of articles were published there, that is, I made quite a decent income from it, although not often.
Well, the supplement to “Young Technician” became “my magazine” for a long time. Now I can’t even remember how many of my homemade products were published there
Well, as a result, I can say that the role of all these magazines at that time is simply difficult to overestimate. Even in those cases when a person did nothing about them, like me, for example, they provided a lot of information, food for thought and development of the intellect.
The presence of such magazines created such an excellent developmental environment, so that the child, having them, did not particularly need to receive any other additional information.
It is important that today magazines that are interesting to children are in demand. I judge this from what I see in the Regional Children's and Youth Library next door to my house. Quite a lot of periodicals are subscribed to there, including such a magazine as “The World of Technology for Children.” Children come there to read it all the time.
I asked them why they didn’t ask for it to be written out to them at home. And they answer me that... their parents tell them “there’s no need to litter the house.” “If you want to read, go to the library!” "No money". Moreover, they have money to buy a mobile (and expensive!) phone, but not for an educational children's magazine!
These people will still have a chance to reap the fruits of such “upbringing,” but in the meantime, smart children read magazines in the library, and stupid ones stare at nothing but the screen of their mobile phone. However, this is clearly not enough for the development of intelligence.
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