August 21, 2024

So Long, American Tech


So Long, American Tech
Google HQ in Mountainview, CA.  The Pancake of Heaven!, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Further sanctions by the US Department of the Treasury on Russia will come into effect on September 12. As such, services including Google, Slack, iCloud, and YouTube will either be significantly slowed or blocked entirely from users in Russia. 

Russian tech companies such as VKontakte are now rushing to fill the gaps that may soon disrupt social and professional networks across the country, encouraging users to use the services VK Calls and VK Video instead of their American counterparts.

However, it appears that execs at VK predict that, at least in the short term, these services may not cut it for Russians used to functional foreign tech: A letter acquired by Verstka to employees at VK said they "understand that the service does not always work as it should, but we are actively improving and improving the functionality so that VK Calls becomes even more convenient :)."

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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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This acclaimed biography of one of Russia’s most important and tyrannical rulers is not only a rich, readable biography, it is also surprisingly timely, revealing how many of the issues Russia faces today have their roots in Ivan’s reign.
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The Samovar Murders

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Okudzhava Bilingual

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Survival Russian

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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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Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

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