I found out about his death from a BBC Russian Service breaking news alert I got on my phone (I got the app shortly after the start of the war). And I was surprised by how much the news... "upset" is a strong word. I would say "unsettled."

( Some more thoughts, in addition to what I wrote elsewhere on social media )

This is definitely an... interesting time to mark the 77th anniversary of the Nazi Germany surrender and, with it, the end of World War II in Europe ( Read more... )

When the Russian-Ukrainian War broke out, my mom and I knew that there are going to be rallies and protests in support of Ukraine and against the war - and we wanted to be a part of it. But my usual sources within the Russian-speaking communities, and the general activist chatter on Twitter, kept failing me. I kept finding out that event after ( Read more... )

I mean, striking military targets within a foreign territory... Feels like an invasion to me ( Read more... )

My paternal biological grandfather, whom I've been calling Grandpa Gena G. in this LJ, was born in what is now Belarus. Though, as he pointed out to me a few times, he moved to then-Leningrad for college and hasn't really left, he usually went back to Belarus every summer to spend a few weeks in a house he inherited from his dad, in the small ( Read more... )

This was originally supposed to be part of the previous post, but it didn't quite flow with the rest of what I wrote, so I decided to split it off into a separate post ( Read more... )

On her recent trip to the Latvian resort town of Jūrmala, neferjournal came across something I never would have imagined existed a gallery of paintings that can be seen in a different light - in the most literal way possible.

As always, the translated text is in Italics, and my notes (if any) are in plain text.

If I didn't happen to wind up in Jūrmala, and ( Read more... )

I knew going in that 1944, Estonia’s entry into this year’s Chicago European Union Film Festival, was going to be a difficult film.

Both in the West and in Russia, we like to think of World War II as the one “good” war, with people of the world facing off against the great, genocidal evil. Growing up, I certainly heard plenty about Russians and ( Read more... )

When I saw humus's scans of a photo album published by Russkiy Listok (Russian Sheet) newspaper in 1904, I thought it was going to be a curious novelty. I would send a link to tweelore, mysticowl, annanov and maybe kafka_chan and move on.


( Read more... )

A few days ago, some pretty shocking allegations lit up the pro-government Ukrainian social media. I originally saw it in a post over at pauluskp's LJ, but Google and Yandex search turns up plenty of other places. They're all showing a poster that was supposedly a military recruitment seen around occupied Donetsk ( Read more... )