Russian Blog

A good Russian-English and English-Russian online dictionary can be easily accessed at

словарь

Make sure you кликать the box next to перевод to get a translation and not a Russian definition.

If you don’t have a Russian font available, type something random in and hit enter. At the results page you can now see a little green word on the left that says клавиатура. If you click on that it will give you a keyboard and you can start looking things up.

This dictionary often will list idioms and phrases relating to the word you're looking up. But it doesn't always give examples for all the words.

Russia’s independent media has been muffled by the Kremlin in recent years, but a few frantic voices are still trickling through. Радио Свобода and Эхо Москвы cover some more risky topics.

How many games of chess did Gari Kasparov have to play to beat Karpov? Maybe 30? Maybe 40? No! More!

And why suddenly did he switch from chess to politics?

Hear him talk about it with Steve Paulson on the Wisconsin Public Radio show "To the Best of our Knowledge."

RealAudio

BBC correspondent James Rodgers is living in Moscow and writing about it. Last week he talked about midnight shopping, this week he wrote about life in Yekaterinburg. His impressions match many that I felt just coming to live in Moscow. And the responses he gets betray what he doesn't see as a newcomer.

Diary

The Садовое Кольцo circles Moscow. In tsarist times it was a ring of greens spaces and gardens (сады) on the rim of the city. Today its name is an oxymoron, as it is a common place for пробки, Moscow's massive traffic jams. But in this video, it's unusually empty, and the driver makes it all the way around the city in six minutes.

When I lived in Russia for the first time for a while, people kept asking me, "Договорились?"

The first few times I didn't know what the word meant. So I said, "I don't know," or "No?" And then we would go over everything that we has just said. "We're meeting at the Orbit Movie Theater, outside the metro station, at 4pm, you think this is ok?" "Sure that's ok." "Хорошо, договорились?" Um. Did we? Did someone else? You tell me.

Well, to end the repetition, I started saying "да."

You can see a little bit more about him on Animator.ru's site.
You can also listen to an undistributed soundtrack from his film Падал прошлегодный снег. It's very good.

Have you heard the complaint that Russians don’t smile? Have you traveled to Russia to find the sales people rude or disengaged? Have you ever looked at a Russian photo album and wondered if they’re not all depressed?

It’s true, Russians smile less than Americans, and they’re well aware of it.