December 28, 2021

Droning on About Lake Baikal


Droning on About Lake Baikal
The term “lake” is really quite deceiving... Baikal is so big it feels rather like an ocean (as many residents call it).  Photo by Alexandra Curtis

We here at Russian Life love Lake Baikal and are glad to see that advanced science and technology are being used to help maintain the Lake's natural beauty.

The East Siberian Railway announced earlier this week that it will begin to use specially designed drones to monitor for potentially hazardous situations near the lake, such as fuel spills, water leaks, fires, or landfills. The drones will be able to mark the exact coordinates of these obstacles, making it easier to track them in the future.

What makes these particular drones special is their ability to cover large amounts of land. While regular drones may run out of charge fairly quickly, these drones were designed specifically to handle to needs of the world's largest freshwater lake.

Of course, regular drones are also quite useful if you are just trying to capture incredible video footage of the amazing beauty on Lake Baikal, too. 

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Bears in the Caviar

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.
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

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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