In this week's Odder News, enormous pumpkins, LARPing in honor of Alexander Nevsky, and horses in cars.

Let's take a trip to a nation that no longer exists! We've got an old hard-cover travel guide to lead the way. 

In May, the Russian Federation temporarily banned the export of grechka, also known as buckwheat, from June 5 to August 31.

It takes something special in a human being to create a thing from scratch, to see a slab of stone and carve it into a sculpture, to see an empty storefront and turn it into a store, to sketch out a multistory building on paper and then shepherd it into existence in the real world.

Sometimes the most incredible things can be hidden in plain sight. In this case, a main thoroughfare in the capital.

The progenitor of Russian Life got its start 65 years ago this fall. We talk to one of its famous early editors about what it was like to write about Russia for the world in that era.

Listening to the intensely chromatic compositions of Sofia Gubaidulina can be challenging. You wouldn’t put her music on to relax or to be energized. As with any avant-garde work, taking it in can feel like work.

It is astonishing to think that as recently as the eighteenth century – not the Middle Ages, not the days of Marco Polo, but in the supposedly enlightened eighteenth century – people still had only the vaguest idea of where Asia ended and America began.

By mid-October of 1941, Moscow seemed on the verge of falling to the Nazis. German troops had reached the city’s edge, and there were rumors of fascist tanks closing in.

After almost ten years, the Alexander Palace, the final home of the Romanovs, is back and open for visitors.

An often-overlooked high-seas tale of swashbuckling adventure, empire, and exchange between Russia and Japan.

Thirty years ago this week, Russia became an independent country... again.