The UK’s latest corruption scandal is all about BP’s Lord Browne and the company’s use of everything from hookers to hash in ‘winning’ oil contracts.
Britain’s Daily Mail was forced to pull the story minutes after publication - not here anymore - but well-meaning bloggers have re-sleazed it here and here.
First, you wonder why the Government [...]

I really should get one of those birthday calendars. I missed a couple lately.

First of all, Valentina Tereshkova, the first Soviet woman in space, was 70 last month. There’s a little commemorative photo album at RIA Novosti. On her return to earth, Valentina married another famous Russian cosmonaut, Andriyan Nikolayev. Whether this was role model [...]

I fully expected to see the old funicular railway in Svetlogorsk. Last time I was here, it was dark and they told me it was closed. What they didn’t mention - or maybe it was my poor Russian - is that the last train ran in 1960.
Not until 1973 did Svetlogorsk get a replacement. Perhaps [...]

If your favourite colour is concrete, you’ll love Kaliningrad’s landmark, the House Of Soviets. Most people don’t. According to travel writer, A. A. Gill, it’s ‘the most stratospherically ghastly building every conceived’. It is ‘communism’s Taj Mahal and emphatically hellish.’ Well, let’s say that it draws emphatic opinions.
These comments always remind me of a [...]

With Spam, Russians got their very first taste of capitalism. Under lease-lend in WW2, shiploads (sic) of Spam was sent to Russia. It’s probably why Russians clung to communism for another 50 years. But if you can find someone to lease or lend you a tin, there are nostalgic ways with Spam.

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On Saturday Night Live, Wayne Campbell famously said: ‘the best thing about the collapse of the Soviet Union is that there would be ‘no more cheesy behind-the-iron-curtain metal bands like Gorky Park.’

Still the only ‘Soviet’ bands most Westerners can name are probably Gorky Park and the Leningrad Cowboys. Both were packaged with kitch Soviet-look [...]

And the winner is . . . the Kiev funicular railway. (1964)
If you didn’t click through the links on Svetlogorsk, you will have missed a treat of a page for Sovietica buffs: Soviet Funiculars.
It has been my privilege to ride several of these, but how many can claim to be truly Soviet is questionable. [...]

It’s always interesting to read a travel piece about somewhere you visited. Just to compare notes. Today the Moscow Times obliged with a feature on Novgorod Veliky.
Staff writer Anna Malpas points out that it’s not to be confused with Nizhny Novgorod. Perhaps one should add, nor anywhere else. The other day this blog picked [...]

Winston Churchill called the sailors of the Arctic Convoys, on the Barents Sea, ‘the bravest men afloat’. Between 1941 and 1945, they ran the gauntlet of U-boats and Luftwaffe with supplies of food and munitions critical to keeping Russians alive and in the war.
The men were brave, certainly. While a regular WW2 soldier faced a [...]

The disclaimer that goes with this is that there might not be exactly, you know, a whole seven. I could be scratching around for more than a couple. But this here - one of several Soviet war monuments around Novgorod, is a definite candidate.
It’s similar in concept to the cosmonaut monument at VDNK in Moscow: [...]