A couple months ago, I added a new stop to my daily tour of the InterWebs, a site called English Russia. It’s a photoblog that documents the strange, beautiful, sad, and sometimes — like the image above of subway “team sleepers” — humorous aspects of life in the Russian-speaking countries. The photos and occasional videos are described in English so you’ll know what you’re looking at.

I find this site fascinating — I grew up during Reagan’s tenure in the White House, when the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire and Russians were mysterious, faceless villains lurking in the dark corners of the world. After the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR imploded, it was if a whole other planet had been discovered, and I went through a phase of intense curiosity about the former Soviet nations. I wanted to know what the landscape looked like, what life was like over there, what the people really thought about things instead of what propaganda had always told us they thought. I even bought a Russian watch and a set of defunct coins, thinking they might be worth something some day. The idea that something as huge and intractable as the US-Soviet rivalry, a paradigm that seemed to my teenaged mind as eternal as the stars themselves, could evaporate almost literally overnight was bewildering to me. If only I’d had access to this web site back in 1990!

Here are some of the recent entries that have caught my interest:

• I wrote a story about the 1986 reactor meltdown accident at Chernobyl for my high school yearbook. Here is a large collection of shots from “the Lost City of Chernobyl,” which was largely abandoned following the accident.
• Did you know the Soviets built their own version of our space shuttle? It was called Buran, and it only flew in space once, under remote control. The program ultimately ran out of money, another victim of the USSR’s economic disaster. Here is a series of photos from Buran‘s glory days. As you can see, it looked very much like our shuttle, minus the big engine nacelles on the orbiter itself. This shot is practically a duplicate of a Columbia poster I used to have.
• Here‘s a follow-up to the previous item, showing Buran today. The orbiter’s in sad condition, I’m afraid, covered in dust, its heatshield tiles falling off as it rots in some forgotten boneyard somewhere. Maybe with our shuttle about to retire, some wealthy entrepeneur ought to think about buying and refurbishing the old girl?
• I love news stories in which some old piece of hardware is discovered in a cave or something and brought back into the light of day. Here’s a doozy from that genre, a Russian tank pulled from the bottom of a lake after 50 years. According to our intrepid Russian correspondant, the tank, which was buried under “a 3-metre layer of peat,” was “in good condition, with no rust, and all systems (except the engine) in working condition. …As far it has been known [sic], after a small repair and service they were able to start it’s [sic] diesel engine.” Amazing…
• Russian cars aren’t all that interesting to me, but I was amused to see that there are rednecks in Russia, too. I especially love the plush bunny stuck in the grill…
• Check out the Russian Goth leatherboy and his custom-made dragon bag.
• An assortment of strange Russian buildings, several of which look like something from an old cover of Astounding Stories.
• Okay, so this one is here entirely for prurient reasons: it’s Russia’s answer to Britney Spears, a pop star named Anna Semenovich. Hey, Russian chicks are cute…
• Just for Cranky Robert, here’s a comparison of vodka-drinking and yoga positions.
• How cold does it get where you live? I’ll bet that Novorosiysk on the Black Sea is colder.
• Here’s a set of black-and-white portraits of a Russian man with a fascinatingly weather-beaten face. I love the blogger’s disclaimer on this entry: “He is not homeless, he is just Russian.”
• And finally, some gorgeous shots of St. Petersburg, a place that inched a little higher on my list of places to visit after I saw them. I especially liked this one, this one, and this one