Bolshoie Mac

In 1995 when we arrived in Yekaterinburg Russia, some of the Ural State University journalism faculty took us to lunch.  They apologized for the poor quality.  Good manners kept us from agreeing. Probably the countries’ best restaurant, they told us, was in Moscow, a day’s train ride to the west.  Opened by Chicago’s McDonald four years ahead of our curriculum changes assignment We heard Russians were standing in long lines to order a ‘Bolshei’…translates as

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Russian Cucumbers

Read how Ukraine war sanctions will affect Russian families.   Wall Street Journal: Axey Furnosov, an auditor, lost money when the Russian stock market plunged at the start of the war and has been watching rising prices hit his pocketbook.  He now says he will plant the entire garden at his dacha in Vladimir, a historic city near Moscow, this year with potatoes and zucchini for his young child, plus tomatoes and cucumbers to marinate for

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Texan in Russia

 In 1995, February to May, I learned enough Russian language to answer the telephone in our Yekaterinburg two-room flat.  If the caller spoke only Russian, I learned to answer in their language:             “I don’t understand. I am American.”  Then I hung up. If today, as you read and hear about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and you want to understand more about Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, I suggest a book of 687 pages:  Never Speak

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Lake Baikal

May, 1995. For four months I spent U.S. Information Service taxpayer’s money advising on journalism curriculum for Ural State University, 24 miles west of where Siberia begins. Headed back home, Margaret and I rode the Trans-Siberian Railroad west from Yekaterinburg, Russia to Peking, China.  In between, we detrained at Irkutsk in Siberia.   Met with journalism teachers who insisted we make an overnight visit to nearby Lake Baikal–the world’s deepest lake, with a fifth of the

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Abacus

Will never forget the great Christmas Day battle between digital machine and the age-old abacus. Before Texas Instruments invented a hand-held, battery powered calculating machine, ancients invented the abacus. Internationalists should know that in 1995 an abacus was still used to double-check that newly arrived, old fashion cash register.  Saw a Russian in a food store doing just that calculation. His fingers moved those beads on a wire faster than the machine. I got my

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A Russian Profession

In 1995, you taxpayers—who pay for the United States Information Agency—sent Margaret and me to Russia.   My mission: advise Ural State University journalism department how to revise their ‘propaganda’ curriculum.   This university lies in the center of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s third largest city, two times zones east of Moscow, 28 miles west of Siberia.  We spent four snow-covered months there and never saw soil until May. I wrote a ‘Texan in Russia’ column and emailed this

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My own jailer

In 1995 we spent four months in Ekaterinburg Russia where we lived in a two-room apartment.    We were cautioned by our Russian landlord “Don’t open the door to anyone you don’t know.  Not even if you look through the peep hole and they are wearing a uniform.  Criminals have disguised themselves as a militia to break into apartments.” So when we entered our apartment, we unlocked a steel door and then unlocked a bolt

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