August 17, 2021

Wild Weather and Wildfires


Wild Weather and Wildfires
Snow in Magadan. This picture is from January, not this summer, but still... Wikimedia Commons user Yevgeny Serov

Like the rest of the world, Russia has been experiencing some odd weather this summer.

Despite foreign stereotypes, Russia does have summer weather . . . usually. Even Siberia. But in the Siberian port city of Magadan, it has snowed three times this summer.

Up on the Kolyma Gulf on the Arctic, building summer snowpeople is not unusual. But in Magadan, at the southern end of the Kolyma Region, it is an unexpected way to spend a summer afternoon.

The snow has fallen in Magadan amid unusually hot weather in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere in Russia. Wildfires in Siberia have become the world's worst at the moment. Yakutia, one of the world's coldest inhabited spots in the winter, is unseasonably hot and the hardest hit. The smoke has drifted to Alaska and the North Pole. The Yakutia fire could turn into the biggest fire in world history. With Russia the biggest country in the world by a large margin, this is not so surprising.

Greenpeace estimates that 62,000 square miles of Russia have burned in 2021. President Putin is alarmed. Wildfires accelerate carbon dioxide emissions in a nasty, nightmarish climate change loop: the Siberian fires have released more carbon dioxide than Britain's emissions for the entire year of 2019.

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93 Untranslatable Russian Words

Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.

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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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