April 16, 2021

Raving in Khimki


Raving in Khimki
Thankfully, it wasn't the Hash-Slinging-Slasher this time.  Alexander Popov, unsplash.com

Grab your glowsticks: the Moscow region city of Khimki is lit! And unlit... and then lit again.

Rapidly flickering lights went on for an hour in apartment buildings along three entire streets near Moscow. 

While the quick flashing outages wreaked havoc on appliances, Russians, as usual, made the best of things. Residents of the area took to social media sites to post videos of the light show. Along with dancing emojis and funky music, these videos are actually pretty awesome, as locals treated the mechanical failure as a city-wide rave.

The cause of such a large and unusual power outage? A single broken cable, authorities report. We aren't exactly sure how that all works out, but we are grateful nonetheless that it brought a little bit of the dance party to our newsfeeds.

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Some of our Books

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Advance reviewers are calling this new translation "a coup" and "a remarkable achievement." This rediscovered gem of a novel by one of Russia's finest writers explores some of the thorniest issues of the early twentieth century.

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This exciting new trilogy by a Russian author – who has been compared to Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco – vividly recreates a lost world, yet its passions and characters are entirely relevant to the present day. Full of mystery, memorable characters, and non-stop adventure, The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas is a must read for lovers of historical fiction and international thrillers.

 
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This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.

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Bears in the Caviar is a hilarious and insightful memoir by a diplomat who was “present at the creation” of US-Soviet relations. Charles Thayer headed off to Russia in 1933, calculating that if he could just learn Russian and be on the spot when the US and USSR established relations, he could make himself indispensable and start a career in the foreign service. Remarkably, he pulled it of.

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