Category: Russia

Dreams of Power: Cocaine, Rare Earth Metals, and Unexpected Diplomacy | January 03 2026, 13:40

I slept through everything. What are you betting on 1) all the cocaine is ours now? 2) they’ll release them in exchange for a deal on rare earth metals and oil? 3) Maduro turns up in Saratov?

Rediscovering Gorodki: A Glimpse into a Traditional Russian Sport | December 20 2025, 05:29

Suddenly today, the word “gorodki” popped into my head. When I was a little boy, in Baku, Azerbaijan, we used to play two games in the courtyard – gorodki and knives.

I Google it. The internet tells me that in Russia there is a Russian Federation of Gorodki Sport. It has a president, a first vice-president, and a vice-president. All in blazers. There is a presidium, and it has a chairman of the commission on international relations. There is a whole apparatus for the president of gorodki sport with three advisers and a responsible secretary. They hold conferences, at least in 2018 and 2020. There is a march of gorodki players, music by A. Roshchin, lyrics by V. Avdeev, I. Vinogradsky.

The website has a section “Anti-Doping”. Can you imagine doping in gorodki sport? It has a subsection “methodological recommendations”.

In 2024, there was a World Championship of Gorodki Sport. And it had a Grand Closing. Besides Belarus, athletes from Germany and Kazakhstan participated in the world championship. From Germany, besides Sergey, Vitaly, and Konstantin, there was Schlein Eugen, or rather, Zhenya.

Masters of sport. To be admitted to international competitions, one must come with a certificate, oh, a certificate of having undergone anti-doping education from an institution, whatever that means.

In general, it’s all very serious.

But I did not find a federation for the game of knives.

Comparing US and Russian Higher Education Systems through Credit Hours | December 10 2025, 17:35

Regarding education in the USA and the USSR/Russia. My degree in the USA is evaluated as a Master of Science degree in Computer Science. My younger colleagues say that a Russian university degree is rarely recognized as a Master’s these days, and often hardly qualifies even for a Bachelor’s. I decided to look at the numbers and was very surprised.

To earn a bachelor’s degree in the USA, you need to spend about 2000 hours in classrooms/laboratories. In terms of credits, this equals 120 credit hours. One credit usually equals 1 hour (50 minutes) of lectures per week for a semester (15 weeks). Laboratory work has a different coefficient (often 2–3 hours in the lab count as 1 credit), so the actual number of classroom hours is slightly higher (closer to 2000+).

So, my diploma states that I spent 7908 hours in classes over five years. That’s four times more than the typical student in the USA. Based on the numbers, it turns out that I spent about 2000 hours on math, physics, and English alone over five years, with a total of 42 subjects.

A colleague shared that in his Russian bachelor’s diploma there are 3140 academic hours, which is twice as less. And can you share how many hours are in your diploma?

Year of graduation, university, specialty, and the number of hours? I’m curious about the range of variation.

Nostalgia and Innovation: The Story of Starchat.ru | December 09 2025, 23:41

2003. We had a chat, my creation, Starchat.ru, where people constantly hung out and communicated with each other. It had a Java applet! Nobody even remembers what that is nowadays, probably. Initially, some programmer I found on the internet wrote this thing, who then disappeared, and I took over the support.

Just for laughs, I made a bot that you could chat with by simply sending it a private message. It was always online, and not everyone realized that it was a bot. When the robot received a message, it searched through massive chat logs for messages that contained the most words from the query and had some response. A response is the next message directed at the user by someone (like “Vasya: oh just go you know where!” is a response to Vasya’s message). In the chat interface, you had to click on a message and then reply to it. In the presence of several options (and there were always several options, given the traffic of chatters), a random one was chosen.

It turned out to be a robot that very amusingly answers questions. If you ask it what its name is, it always replies with different names but appropriately, with emojis and suffixes, often swearing. Also, the bot always gave adequate responses to standard questions like “where do you live” or “how old are you.” Since there was a huge history, and they talked about everything in general, it was hard to find a question to which the system did not give an interesting/correct/funny answer.

So, the bot had an interesting side effect. If you start swearing at it offensively, it begins to swear back even more offensively. And generally, it often reacts inadequately to attacks and reproaches. Simply because in real conversations, a polite question is answered politely, and a rude one — of course, rudely. The audience had a lot of fun with this bot.

It was especially interesting to read the bot’s logs afterward. People there didn’t understand that it was a robot. They asked it questions, quarreled and made up with it. It was fun)

Cultural Expectations of Driving for Work: USA vs Russia | November 22 2025, 16:21

Here’s what I’ve noticed. In the USA, there’s an expectation that an employee drives themselves if their job involves traveling. Companies often issue a company car or provide compensation for using a personal vehicle. This is commonly considered a regular part of job responsibilities, and having a driver’s license is often implicitly assumed. For example, Nadia, a volleyball coach, occasionally drives a small bus for us.

As I recall, the tradition in Russia is different: in organizations, especially in government, large corporations, or among managerial staff, it is more logical to expect a designated driver.

Am I mistaken?

Revisiting Antalya: 25 Years Later and Family Bonds | September 15 2025, 15:56

I’m back from Antalya. I was there last time 25 years ago. This time I met up with my mom (she’s from Russia) and showed her Turkey №2. Turkey №1 was last year (Istanbul). Here are some photos from this trip. All taken on an iPhone (I brought a camera too, but was too lazy to carry it around).

Russian pop music is no longer blasting from every speaker, but Modern Talking and similar genres are everywhere, until midnight. I was lucky to rent a hotel just 9 steps away from a night bar that quiets down at midnight, but no worries, we got used to it quickly and the music is decent. The city has many Russians, not only because it’s easy to get there, but also because Turkey offers citizenship for $400K — a sum many Russians can afford for a “passport”. But there’s really nothing to do there. You can tour all the natural sites within the first year or two, and then it’s just a very boring city. No museums, no cultural activities, except for more Modern Talking from the bars. So, at a minimum, you need not only to go there for the passport but also actively use it to live somewhere else.

My mom did great, handling all those hills and boats, and had a lot of impressions. Actually, she has only been abroad in Riga and twice in Turkey, last year in Istanbul and this year in Antalya. I really hope for her 80th birthday next year we’ll go somewhere else where Russians don’t need a visa.