The Russia Blog
The Siberian husky is one of the most celebrated breeds of dog in the world. Russian’s are truly proud of the hard working and lovable nature of these animals and here are some Siberian husky facts that you may not know.
Siberian Huskies were specifically bred as working dogs
The Siberian Husky’s durable qualities weren’t… Read the rest
Yet another horrendous month for Russia, as a dam explosion kills 70, a suicide bomber kills 20, and a freighter goes missing very publicly in the Atlantic.
100 years after the Tunguska explosion, a British documentary crew visits Siberia to try and find out what really happened. On the way they talk to everyone, from the crackpots who think it was an exploding alien spacecraft, to the scientists who think it was a metor.
A few months ago, news broke (yet again) that Russia planned to build a tunnel under the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska. Well, it looks like a tunnel isn’t the only option on the drawing board.
Engineers are also considering how they could build a bridge across the Bering Strait. Or, to be more… Read the rest
A BBC poll reported that 90% of Russians regularly drink anti-freeze.
But not all was as it seemed. Russian bloggers, taking exception to a Russian language BBC article about alcohol abuse in Izhevsk, decided to spam the BBC’s online poll:
Within hours, sometimes at a rate of two votes per second, more than 25,000 testified
Scandal hit the Miss Virtual Yakutia contest this year, when it was revealed that one of the finalists… was a man. Newslab.ru reports:
Anzhela Adamova was a young man called Oleg Goncharov, who decided to take part in the beauty contest by joke. He went to a stylist and after that made a portfolio at
The image below is from Google Maps.
Notice the blur in the middle? I didn’t put it there – Google did. Click on this link to check for yourself.
Then scroll out a bit, using the controls of the left of the screen. Notice anything else?
Yep – the blurred out area is… Read the rest
Clearly, one should not mess with a siberian squirrel:
Squirrels have bitten to death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report.
Passers-by were too late to stop the attack by the black squirrels in a village in the far east, which reportedly lasted about a minute.
Laurence Jarvik links to a couple of reports that Russia should buy Alaska to solve America’s finacial difficulties.
I read the original Washington Post column by Steven Pealstein that proposed selling Alaska as a solution to America’s financial problems. (It also said that Alaska had a Soviet-style economy because of federal spending obtained by
Charlie Ganske at Russia Blog has a thoughtful post about whether Russia should focus its energies on maintaining a nuclear arsenal, or on preventing the breakup of the Motherland.
Today’s Washington Times features a story on Russia’s successful test of a maneuverable re-entry warhead. While this may bolster the national pride of Russian scientists
Following his sentencing, ex-Yukos boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been sent to a jail in Siberia – YaG-14/10 to be precise, which is near Chita. His co-defendant, Platon Lebedev has been sent to a prison in the Arctic region of Yamalo-Nenets, 2,000 km north of Moscow.
There is some concern about the legality of these moves,… Read the rest
One of the joys of writing siberianlight.net is the random stuff I find while searching the net. Take this piece of Star Trek fan-fiction I found today on Technorati, for example, in which Capain Kirk takes a trip down memory lane and (almost) visits Siberia’s finest city:
“That is correct, Colonel. Our captain has
The Moscow Times reports that UNESCO are becoming so concerned about the environmental safety of Lake Baikal that they are considering putting the Lake, already a World Heritage site, on their “in danger” list. And not just that, but they may even do so without the permission of the Russian government:
An evaluation team
The Guardian today reports on the increasing threat that Siberian forest fires are causing to the global environment.
Fires in the Siberian forests – the largest in the world and vital to the planet’s health – have increased tenfold in the last 20 years and could again rage out of control
