Photo: Sergey Teplyakov/vkontakte

Russian police does not take kindly to protests, even those carried out by toys and dolls:

Police in the Siberian city of Barnaul have asked prosecutors to investigate the legality of a recent protest that saw dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: "I'm for clean elections" and "A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin".

"Political opposition forces are using new technologies to carry out public events – using toys with placards at mini-protests," Andrei Mulintsev, the city's deputy police chief, said at a press conference this week, according to local media. "In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event."

Link - via Metafilter

I grew up during the Cold War, with an image of Moscow as a drab, grey, cold, Soviet citadel. But the Cold War has been over for 20 years! This video shows the city as beautiful and colorful, both historical and modern. -via Everlasting Blort

In 1948, the Russian dance troupe Berezka formed, taking its name from the Russian word for birch tree. Audiences were mesmerized by its special step, hidden beneath the dancers’ long, flowing dresses. They appear to actually float over the floor! Skip to about 1:30 in the video to see this effect.

Link -via The Presurfer

From what I’ve been able to piece together from a commenter at 9GAG and a few travel books, there’s a bar called The Real McCoy in the Barrikadnaya neighborhood of Moscow that sells vodka bottle loaves like this. It has all of the components of a complete and nutritious breakfast.

Link -via That’s Nerdalicious!

Russia seems like a chaotic place to live, with giant pigeons lurking around every corner, blighted urban landscapes full of dogs getting it on, and an extremely diverse citizenry trying their best to act like nothing’s wrong.

These photos capture a side of Russia few outside the country ever get to see, and each image has an interesting story to tell.

Link

Okay, we’ve got to sell these Ladas. Guys, fall in. You, take this clarinet thing. And you, here’s a guitar. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know how to play. Every sound that we make is going to get dubbed over.

-via Borepatch

Sergei Ganyushev, a 25-year-old from Arkhangelsk, Russia, was stranded on an island in the White Sea only 150 kilometers from the Arctic Circle for 16 days. He set out along on October first to gather seaweed, but his boat sprang a leak.

Sergei managed to swim to Malaya Sennukha, one of the small stony islets dotting the area. There he survived on seaweed and rainwater, taking shelter in a makeshift dwelling of stones and a few wooden planks.

He said he gave up looking for passing ships three days before rescue and was about to take his own life when the helicopter flew overhead. When he heard the rotor, he managed to get up and wave down the aircraft.

Curiously, no one had reported Sergei missing. The helicopter was looking for survivors from another seafaring incident, in which a motorboat with a monk and a worker from a nearby Orthodox Christian monastery sank in the vicinity of the archipelago last Thursday.

The monk was found dead, but the search continues for his companion. Ganyushev was treated for hypothermia and malnutrition. Link -via Arbroath

This is a triangular letter. During World War II, Russian soldiers folded their letters home in a way that required no envelope -it’s actually quite easy. And it was also easy for censors to open and read them before sending them on. Families back home were excited to see this shape arrive in the mail. Read about the letters and the men who wrote them at Poemas del río Wang. Link -via Metafilter

DeviantArt user Santani creates unbelievably cool fantasy creatures with fabric, clay and fur. The designs are simply amazing and incredibly realistic even though the creatures are obviously imaginary.

Link Via BuzzFeed

Fans of abandoned places and urban exploration are in for a treat, with a look at an aircraft graveyard at Vozdvizhenka air base in the Primorsky Krai region of eastern Russia, just 40 miles from the Chinese border. There is no security to stop urban explorers, just the aircraft sitting unused, with grass growing under them and nature doing its best to reclaim the base. See more pictures at UrbanGhosts. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Maks Maydachenco)

If you haven’t taken the mental_floss quiz on Soviet leaders yet (and want to), go do that before reading this post, because it contains spoilers. Neatoramanaut Stubb left a comment that blew my mind.

I’m pretty sure most russians don’t consider Malenkov part of the line of sovereign leaders, and that Khrushchev followed Stalin. It all has to do with the hair, you see. Ever since Catherine the Great took over for Peter the Great, the pattern has been:

Catherine I – Full-haired
Peter II – Bald (shaved for wig)
Anna I – Full-haired
Ivan IV – Bald (infant Emperor)
Elizabeth – Full-haired
Peter III – Bald (shaved for wig)
Catherine II – Full-haired
Paul I – Bald(ing)
Alexander I – Full-haired
Nicholas I – Bald
Alexander II – Full-haired
Alexander III – Bald
Nicholas II – Full-haired
Lenin – bald
Stalin – Full-haired
Khrushchev – Bald
Brezhnev – Full-haired
Andropov – Bald(ing)
Chernenko – Full-haired
Gorbachev – Bald
Yeltsin – Full-haired
Putin – Bald(ing)
Medvedev – Full-haired

This also dictates that the next President should be bald, giving Putin an excellent opportunity to regain (formal) power. Especially since his main opponent, Mikhail Prokhorov has a head full of hair…

A quick check revealed this pattern is correct, explained at NPR in a 2008 post. However, Stubb’s list goes back much further into Tsarist Russia. Link

(Image credit: KoS)

You might not know as much as you think you do when it comes to the USSR. In today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you are challenged to name all the leaders of our old Cold War rival. There were 8 leaders of the former Soviet Union, and the 3 leaders of the new Russian Federation -so far. Can you name them all in ten minutes? I got ten of them, but could not remember the current president! Oh, and spelling counts, which is what ate up my time, but you only need the surname. Link

Caught in a snowstorm, the trekkers veered off course and decided to set up camp on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl – at 5pm on February 2, judging from their photos and diary entries. They went to sleep. Then something horrific occurred, the nature of which we can but guess at. Some have suggested that it was an avalanche, but others aren’t satisfied with this explanation. Only one thing is known for sure. Whatever it was, it was serious enough to make the skiers leap up in the middle of the night and escape from their tent by cutting it open from the inside. Some didn’t even bother to put on clothes or boots as they ventured outside into the bitter cold.

When the bodies were finally recovered, some had unexplained wounds, and the tongue of one woman was missing. Read about the investigation and the various theories about what happened to the campers, at Environmental Graffiti. Link

When I was in school, the only things you could do to show off your originality was to switch up your clothes, hair and make up. One Russian school decided to let the kids have a little more fun by allowing each one to draw up their own background on the chalk boards. The results are delightfully fun so be sure to check out the other pics at the link.

Link

Photo Credit: AP

Not that one is to believe that two heads are better than one… especially when it comes to snakes!  Zookeepers in the Ukraine’s Skazka Zoo have experienced a doubling of visitors since this two-headed albino snake arrived on loan from Germany. Each head is able to act and think on its own.  Zookeeper Rusian Yakovenko stated that sometimes the two heads will fight for food, not realizing that it has the same destination. They’ll even steal food from each other, making feedings interesting, to say the least. Workers state that the three-year-old two foot long snake is quite a handful. The private zoo is in the resort of Yalta on the Black Sea.

Link

Photographer William Carrick and his partner John MacGregor traveled throughout Russia between 1857 and 1878 taking portraits of Russians of all stations and occupations. These pictures form an ethnographic overview of Russia in the 19th century, and are a historical treasure. This picture shows a young vendor with his hand-carved wooden abacuses for sale. See a varied collection of Carrick’s photographs at Environmental Graffiti. Link

The Soviet Union had a terrifying system for handling both criminals and political dissidents we know by one word: Gulag.

From 1930 until 1960, Russian authorities ran a tightly-controlled network of forced labor camps, known as Gulags. Gulag was actually a Russian acronym for Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies, and these camps were often freezing, and forced prisoners to work and live in harsh conditions with very little food. Thriving under both Stalin and in the aftermath of WWII, Gulags housing petty criminals and political prisoners alike. The Gulag network was officially dismantled in 1960, destroying (almost) all of the prison camps, but their legacy lives on today – in memory and in the formation of many towns in the Russian Arctic.

Today most of those sites are totally gone, with little evidence remaining. However, there is a Gulag museum in Perm, and a KGB museum in the legendary Lubyanka building in Moscow that once housed the city’s political detainees. Read more about them at Atlas Obscura. Link

"According to the Bible, Paul the Apostle was a military commander at first and an evil persecutor of Christians before he started spreading the Christian gospel," the sect’s founder, who styles herself Mother Fotina, said.

"In his days in the KGB, Putin also did some rather unrighteous things. But once he became president, he was imbued with the Holy Spirit, and just like the apostle, he started wisely leading his flock. It is hard for him now but he is fulfilling his heroic deed as an apostle."

Link (Photo: Ria Novosti)

Frank Jacobs of Strange Maps blog posted this map that accompanied the Russian translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. It has a distinctly Slavic motif, including log homes for the Hobbit dwellings (instead of those cute Hobbit houses).

Link – via The Map Room | More Hobbit Maps ]]> http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/24/russian-map-of-the-hobbit/feed/ 2 http://www.neatorama.com/2011/03/30/breeding-the-many-eared-cat/ http://www.neatorama.com/2011/03/30/breeding-the-many-eared-cat/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:38:21 +0000 Miss Cellania http://www.neatorama.com/?p=43971 A scientist in Russia, Vladimir Obryvkov of the Voronezh State University of Agriculture, found a stray five-eared cat and brought it home to his family.

The scientist, who has been studying animal anomalies for years, took the cat to X-ray its unusual ears but decided to take her home to his children.

Obryvkov said that the cat named Luntya also has big paws but her behavior does not differ from that of normal cats.

He also said that he wants to mate his new pet with a four-eared cat living in Vladivostok to create a new breed of these fluffy animals.

There may be a market for a breed with multiple ears, but who has time to scratch them all? Link -via Arbroath

Phil Rosenthal created “Everybody Loves Raymond,” one of the funniest and most successful sitcoms of all time. Indeed, here in America, everybody loves Raymond – but in Russia? Now that’s a story that only Phil can tell:

Phil Rosenthal created one of the most successful sitcoms of all-time, “Everybody Loves Raymond.” He was a bona-fide expert in his craft. And then…. the Russians called. In the hilarious EXPORTING RAYMOND, a genuine fish-out-of-water comedy that could only exist in real life, Phil travels to Russia to help adapt his beloved sitcom for Russian television. The Russians don’t share his tastes. They don’t seem to share his sense of humor. But what Phil did discover was a real comedy, filled with unique characters and situations that have to be seen to be believed.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] to see the trailer of Exporting Raymond | Official website

Scientists in Russia have developed techniques for successfully farming “bester” (a hybrid of beluga and sterlet) and successfully harvesting the roe without killing the sturgeon.

Rather than being culled, like elsewhere in the world, the female fish is what can best be called “milked”, gently and harmlessly. Each time a fish is milked it can produce up to a quarter of its weight in caviar. This approach not only makes caviar more accessible but also helps preserve this increasingly scarce and beautiful fish… Russia halted commercial harvesting in 2002. Five years later, the sale of sturgeon and black caviar were banned altogether. Poaching escalated, and so did the prices. Now, the country is trying to return to the heady days of Soviet caviar abundance.

A video at the link illustrates the process, which appears to be similar to that used in this country at state-sanctioned fisheries and trout farms.  The photo comes from English Russia, which has a photoessay with several recipes utilizing caviar.

Link.

“Normalising the beer production market and classifying it as alcohol is totally the right thing to do and will boost the health of our population,” Yevgeny Bryun, the ministry of health’s chief specialist on alcohol and drug abuse, said.

“We have been talking about and have wanted such a measure for ages. I take my hat off to the parliament.”

The new law would restrict beer sales at night, ban its sale in or close to many public places such as schools, and limit cans and bottles to a maximum size of 0.33 litres.

Many Russians consider beer to be a soft drink. Link -via Arbroath

Talking about driving your point home! Pictured above is a billboard created by the government of Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia, to discourage drunk driving. The text on the back side, according to English Russia, reads “Your body could have been here.”

Link via Jalopnik | Photo: English Russia

The woman, dubbed "The Black Widow," who Russian authorities suspect was part of the same militant group that killed 35 people at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport on Monday, was at a house preparing for the attack, which would have occurred on New Year’s Eve at Red Square. Instead, the woman’s mobile phone, which served as the device’s detonator, was activated hours early by a spam message wishing her a happy new year. She was killed, while a man and woman suspected of being accomplices escaped from the house.

Russian security forces told The Telegraph that phones are usually kept off until the last minute for detonation, but in this case, "the terrorists were careless."

Link

The oldest fully wooden churches in the world are also architectural wonders. These are “multi-story, multi-cupola, single-block masterpieces.” Built 300 years ago on the Russian Kizhi island, they are called the Church of the Transfiguration and the Church of the Intercession. Read about them and see lots more pictures at Kuriositas. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Jordi Joan Fabrega)

This little feller, a European Hamster (yes, they also exist in Russia), turns out to be quite a feisty little rodent, as these two hapless Russians found out the hard way (they need the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!). In Soviet Russia, hamsters eat you!

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via metafilter

At first it looks as if the Tetris L block has messed up your game in this Czech building. However, upon further investigation, the block was planned to fall this way in order to keep the bottom floors of the building from being wiped out. See more views with Google Street View. Link -via reddit

English Russia has pictures of the offices at the Russian LEGO headquarters. Look who greets you upon entering! They have whimsical LEGO creations in almost every room. I think my favorite may be the monkey. Link -Thanks, fraulein m!

I can’t speak Russian, which is real shame right now, because I’m really curious about these Russian novels about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The illustrations are truly bizarre, such as the above scene. There are many, many more at the link.

Link via Geekosystem

He recalled that on April 9, 1699, Peter the Great published a trailblazing decree which made it a punishable offence to throw sewage into the street.

“But now we do not even have official regulations for the quality of public lavatories except a document from 1972 that talks about cesspits,” he said, adding that Moscow had a “crying need for modern lavatories”.

The state of public lavatories is generally seen as a disgrace in Moscow, with citizens having to endure stinking and ageing facilities even though they usually have to pay for the privilege of using them.

Link | Photo from the Trans-Siberian Railway by Flickr user Jim Linwood used under Creative Commons license

In 1815, Cossacks returning from the Napoleonic Wars established a village in what is now the Chelyabinsk oblast of Russia. They named it Paris, and their descendants later erected a miniature Eiffel Tower. At the link, you can view several pictures of the site.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Victor Borisov

Forget haunted houses – in Russia, there are entire cities and towns that look haunted. Dark Roasted Blend explains:

We’d like to call them "ghost towns", but they are clearly not abandoned. Amazingly, people still live in them, go to work in harshest possible conditions (paradoxically making it the richest and mightiest industrial area in Russia) and then come "home" to relax in this inhuman weather, non-existing infrastructure, in dangerously dilapidated buildings…

Take, for example, Cherepovetz City ("City of Skulls") shown above. No need for skeletons, monsters, or for that matter, any special effects to make this town terrifying: Link

What they lack in firepower, they make up for in flexibility: they are light and can be deployed quickly to deceive the enemy.

They are also very realistic. They are made of a special material that tricks enemy radar and thermal imaging into thinking they are real weapons.

The inflatables are stitched together at a former hot-air balloon factory.

Link via Slashdot | Photo: BBC News

Only, police in the Russian capital could not get any zebras – so they painted black stripes on white horses instead.

They paraded the horses over crossings, forcing motorists to slow down and read road safety messages.

Thousands of pedestrians die in road accidents in Russia every year.

Perhaps they got the idea from a zoo in Gaza. Link to story. Link to video. -via Arbroath

Previously: The Only Zebra in Gaza

Flickr user Beniah Brawn has many sets of fascinating vintage photographs. Russian Types is a collection of early portraits of Moscow and St. Petersburg residents.

During the 1860s, several photographers based in Moscow and St. Petersburg produced series of cartes-de-visite showing Russian ‘types.’ These remarkable portraits provide a fascinating record of working-class townspeople, artisans, street vendors and peasants, some staged performing an activity, such as drinking tea or gaming, and some photographed in the performance of their occupation.

Read more and see 72 such photographs at Flickr. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

What are these people in Moscow lined up for? Jobs? Cash? No, about 30,000 people lined up for the opportunity to eat at the first McDonalds to open in the city, in 1990. -via Buzzfeed

Andrei Melanyin, seated with his legs crossed, watches the tanks practice from inside a beige tent in the bleachers. As the director of The Invincible and the Legendary, he’s looking for mistakes with a practiced eye. Melanyin is the head of the State Academic Bolshoi Theater of Russia, which includes the world-famous Bolshoi Theater, and a professor at the Institute of Modern Art. “They asked me to come in and do something theatrical,” he says of the government organizers of the event. “They wanted something more than just a technical demonstration.” The show he produced skips like a fake gemstone across Russian history, from the violent founding of the nation out of the Kiev city-state in the 12th century to demonstrations of hand-to-hand combat, set to the music of Ravel’s Bolero, by modern paratroopers. The program also includes a reenactment of a raid  on a terrorist camp by attack helicopters, a display by combat dogs and a parade of heavy vehicles running obstacles. And the tanks—not just jumping ramps, but choreographed in a synchronized dance routine.

It’s part of the Russian Arms Expo going on this week. Read more about the tank ballet at Popular Mechanics. Link -via Boing Boing

A leisure firm in Golubitskaya on the Azov Sea launched a donkey into the air on a parasail as a promotional stunt. After the video was released, Russian police began investigating the matter and may file charges of animal cruelty. If convicted, those responsible could be sentenced to up to two years. Link

Heavy rains in St. Petersburg flooded the streets. What’s a woman to do? This act of chivalry not only kept them dry, but also made the women recording the video squeal with delight. There’s also a bonus surprise that passes by. -via Arbroath

Russian hero Leonid Murlyanchik has been building his metro alone since 1984. All materials are bought for his retired fee. Construction is not over yet.

View the source to see photos of this amazing undertaking.

Link – via BoingBoing

Russian authorities shut down a seven-kilometer-long bridge over the Volga River in Volgograd last week after it started to wobble. Floodwaters loosened one support, which affected the stability of the entire bridge, which is the longest in Europe Russia. The video is reminiscent of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge just before it collapsed. The Volgograd bridge was completed less than a year ago. Link -via Arbroath

Your friend has become a victim of human trafficking. Her ‘hosts’ know that her fear of immigration authorities may prevent her from seeking help. That fear makes it possible for them to continue selling women into sexual slavery. (And yes, that’s exactly what it is. Your friend’s passport will be taken, she will be raped, she won’t be paid and she may never have the opportunity to contact the outside world again). But i promise you, if you contact the police, they will be far less concerned about the immigration status of two Russian women than they will be about potentially bringing down a human trafficking ring. Some jurisdictions even have specific amnesties which protect the victims of human trafficking in return for information about their traffickers. If your friend won’t contact the police, you should call them yourself.
posted by embrangled at 6:02 PM on May 19

Link -via Boing Boing

Update: Newsweek’s blog has an interview with one of the principals in the story. -Thanks, dontyoukeep!

The Dancing Forest is an unusual natural wonder in the Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. Its trees have grown into twisted shapes, as though they were dancing. More images at English Russia.

Link | Photo: Vaplakal.com

A Russian short film from 1946, way before computer generated effects! -via Dark Roasted Blend

English Russia is a marvelous blog filled with pictures of strange and inventive things from Russia. One offering in its archives is a post about “local globes” — the practice of taking local maps and fitting them around globes so that one locality is imagined as a whole world:

In Russia and other post Soviet countries there were a real craze on independence after they finally got it with USSR collapse. Sometimes this took some weird forms like, for example, making the globes of their own country. Yes, those were just like regular globes we used to see on geography classes but instead the whole world only their own country was mapped on it.

These things were officially on sale and still you can buy something like “the globe of Ukraine” in shops of Kiev.

So then people went further and decided to make the globes of their local cities or even villages.

At the link, you can find instructions on how to make your own.

Link via Make | Image: Collage by Sean Michael Ragan of Make

It’s bad enough, it would seem from reality television, to spend a few weeks in the same house as only a few others, but imagine spending your time, with five others, for 520 days, in a shipping container with barely enough space to stretch your legs. This is the setup the European Space Agency has created to test the psychological and physiological effects of such isolation which would be required in a journey to Mars. Two crew members have already been chosen, and once four more are found, the ‘journey’ will begin.

There will be communication with the outside world via radio and email, but radio communications will be delayed a full 20 minutes as they would be on a real interplanetary mission and emails will take twice that time to get through. Both will be disrupted periodically, because what’s the point of locking six men in a container if you don’t mess with their heads a bit?

Link – via mentalfloss

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by nmiller.

he head of the republic said that the humanoid figures wore yellow spacesuits and gave him a tour of their craft, which he described as a “semi-transparent half-tube”. They had brought him home in the morning, just as his worried driver and two advisers were about to call a citywide search after finding his apartment empty.

“I am often asked which language I used to talk to them. Perhaps it was on a level of the exchange of ideas,” Mr Ilyumzhinov, who is also president of the international chess federation FIDE, told the Vladimir Pozner programme on Russia’s main First Channel.

This is not the first time that he has spoken of the alien encounter but yesterday his claims prompted Andrei Lebedev, an MP from the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, to ask Mr Medvedev to order an official inquiry into the alleged alien agents to establish whether Mr Ilyumzhinov disclosed secret information.

Link via Gizmodo | Photo: Reuters