October 05, 2017

Spying for Russia and Flying for Russia


Spying for Russia and Flying for Russia
Big Spies, Little Spies, and Pilots

1. The spy who went out into the cold: British double agent Kim Philby, who defected to Russia in 1963, is getting a new set of honors in his adopted country. A new portrait hangs in the Russian state art gallery, and an anticipated exhibit displays both personal belongings, like a favorite armchair, and many of the secret documents he passed to the Soviets while working in British intelligence. Honoring Philby’s loyalty to Moscow may be a handy way to boost the KGB’s legacy, but however you feel about spies, the spy gadgets make for a great display.  

2. Philby needed a special briefcase to smuggle MI6 documents, but parents today just need a new monitoring service to do the dirty work. The company SocialDataHub has launched such a service, which analyzes kids’ public data on social media and notifies parents if their child seems interested in drugs, weapons, sex, crime, or “radical ideas.” As a bonus, they’ll profile children’s interests and suggest suitable universities and majors. It’s not every service that can offer monitoring and college counseling in one.

3. The sky’s the limit – or it was until this week for Russian girls dreaming of becoming pilots. For the first time in post-Soviet Russia, the Air Force is opening its ranks to young women. Sixteen of them took their army oaths at the Krasnodar Aviation School, starting the path toward becoming military pilots. The Ministry of Defense decided to extend its pilot training program to women after receiving letters from girls across Russia explaining their long-held dreams of the sky and desire to fly for their country.

In Odder News
  • What’s it like to be a female manager in a mostly male industrial factory? Watch and find out.
  • A good day for fidgety fingers: consumer rights watchdog Rospotrebnadzor has ruled that fidget spinners pose no psychological risk to kids wanting to get their spin on.
  • Wisconsin is known for its cheese, Switzerland for its watches, and Dagestan for its wrestlers

Quote of the Week

"For me it doesn’t matter with whom I’m working, man or woman,because it depends on the professional level of the people and their willingness just to hit the target we put together."
—Marina Potoker, managing director of the construction materials company Rockwool Russia, on being a female leader in a male-dominated industry.

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Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin is back on the case in this prequel to the popular mystery Murder at the Dacha, in which a serial killer is on the loose in Khrushchev’s Moscow...

Survival Russian
February 01, 2009

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Survival Russian is an intensely practical guide to conversational, colloquial and culture-rich Russian. It uses humor, current events and thematically-driven essays to deepen readers’ understanding of Russian language and culture. This enlarged Second Edition of Survival Russian includes over 90 essays and illuminates over 2000 invaluable Russian phrases and words.

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Stargorod is a mid-sized provincial city that exists only in Russian metaphorical space. It has its roots in Gogol, and Ilf and Petrov, and is a place far from Moscow, but close to Russian hearts. It is a place of mystery and normality, of provincial innocence and Black Earth wisdom. Strange, inexplicable things happen in Stargorod. So do good things. And bad things. A lot like life everywhere, one might say. Only with a heavy dose of vodka, longing and mystery.

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Murder at the Dacha
July 01, 2013

Murder at the Dacha

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin has a problem. Several, actually. Not the least of them is the fact that a powerful Soviet boss has been murdered, and Matyushkin's surly commander has given him an unreasonably short time frame to close the case.

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