How Long?

Generally speaking, each issue of Russian Life contains about 30,000 words, or around 20-30% of a slim novel. Actually, this issue, our spell-check software tells me, has exactly 32,702 words. Of those, 6,748 are unique words (granted, a somewhat inflated figure, since some of these are not “words,” per se, but simply discrete, word-like units – e.g. numbers – that our computer calls words).

The word “war” appears 176 times in this issue. Which is a lot (in our last issue, it appeared just 87 times).

But does that mean we have adequately commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War in this issue? What do numbers tell us?