This week we explore Soviet throwbacks, social media trends, and coronavirus fugitives.

A Russian city's redesigned seal sports an anatomical typo.

In which we review a book on dissidents, and a novel about literary envy.

The Belarusian President followed his own coronavirus advice, Pomeranian in tow.

The world's novel coronavirus emergency response is, it turns out, not so novel.

A group of communist politicians attempt to celebrate Lenin's 150th with music and posters.

The US President's decree on lunar resource extraction has the Russian space community crying foul.

This week we have a little bit of everything: new cars, freshly-paved streets, and, of course, plenty of coronavirus.

If you build it, they will come. Well, they would, if they weren't all practicing social distancing.

Russia's president discovers ancient pottery, goes spearfishing, and visits a coronavirus hospital.

“This is war. The enemy is invisible, but some lines of the front are clear. Today's difficulties, of course, are far from the horrors known to our history, and that includes the Blockade. That was much worse than today, and scarier.... The noble experience and mysticism of the besieged Hermitage remains with us always and serves as an example.”

- General Director of the State Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky, in a Facebook post on how the Hermitage is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic

In this week's Odder News, the Moscow Zoo tries a new marketing tactic; a consumer protection agency gives its condom recommendations; and high winds call for desperate measures.