Unlike their European counterparts, Russia’s city dwellers do not sort their rubbish into various green bins, blue bins and colour-coded bottle banks.
That’s because there are no bins to start with. For years, Russian apartments have been constructed with a central waste chute and a catch all on every floor.
According to the Ministry of Natural Resources [...]

‘You can send me, dead flowers every morning
Dead flowers in the US mail
You can send me, dead flowers for my wedding
And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave’
- Rolling Stones, ‘Dead Flowers’

It’s a unique feature of Russia. You can hardly pass an old monument or wall bust, and [...]

‘And it’s a heartbreak when you find out
That trouble is real
In a faraway city, with a faraway feel’
- Gram Parsons, ‘Hickory Wind’
There’s no chalk mark at the scene of the crime. Just a bankomat print-out registering the intersection where I was pulled over and shaken down for 400 Euro, one fine [...]

Weddings are just one of the social events that are celebrated on Kaliningrad’s new bridge, so my camera lucked in to this ready posed group.
Tacky dressing buffs may want to elaborate on the many style-pointers in this picture. It’s a bit advanced class tacky for me.
But I know what you’re wondering. [...]

Recently, Kaliningrad acquired a new bridge over the river Pregel.
Well, it’s not exactly new, it’s one of the ancient bridges of Konigsberg. Just that it’s taken Russians sixty odd years to re-instate it following war damage.
Kaliningraders are so surprised and delighted to actually get a piece of useful infrastructure that the bridge has become a [...]

In Kaliningrad, the art of communist propaganda has not been lost. Happy workers, larger than life itself, are still emblazoned on the sides of apartment blocks.This comrade has just discovered how you can now text the complete works of Gorky via the new Soviet miracle of mobile telephony.

When you see pictures of the Dead Zone around Chernobyl, the most poignant pictures are those of the abandoned school and deserted fun-fair.
Novgorod is a bit like that. Amongst its huge housing estates, there isn’t a park, courtyard or corner plot that doesn’t have a children’s playground. Except that there’s not a kid to be [...]

Beautiful Mila writes to me from Kaliningrad. ‘John, there is no snow, no sun, no mood. Only rain.’
Seems like Kaliningrad is not the only city of gray skies and puddles. Carpetblogger has already recorded that ‘Kiev Gray‘ should be a Pantone TM color chart color. Meanwhile the ‘Internet pulse‘, Veronika at Global Voices, is also [...]

By way of introduction, see ‘Sad Stories Always Make Me Blue‘.

Galina Nikolaevna speaks faultless French. She is one of those truly gifted linguists, a simultaneous interpreter. If she lived in New York, Galina would be pulling down a heavy salary at the United Nations. But living in Naberezhnye Chelny, only the odd job from the [...]

Over the Christmas period, I’m going to post some short stories I wrote while in Tatarstan. They come under the category of ‘True Lies’ - or what writers prefer to call ’semi-documentary’. I wrote them about real people - but sourced largely from local gossip.
The Story Of Sveta and Andrei
Perestroika opened the floodgates of [...]