Meet Our Cosmonauts in London!

And don't miss this once-in-a-life chance if you're lucky enough to be in London till March 13, 2016.

Story of space exploration is the story of great achievements of the USSR. The Sputnik opened the sapace age on October 4, First ever human in space, Yuri Gagarin, started his exciting travel as a 1st Lieutenant, and landed as a Major of the Soviet Airforce.

Those who will make it to visit the exhibition in the Science Museum, will see:

... For We Are Russians

We are often told the Russian civilization is in fact a part of the European, Western one. That is, we at all not Asians and shouldn’t look at the East.

In this thesis only one part of the statement is correct: we aren’t Asians.

But from the fact we aren’t Asians doesn’t follow at all that we are Europeans — for we are Russians.

I explain it as one-two-three.

A certain sovereign, Ivan the Great, known also under the number IV and name “the Terrible”*, wrote to the Queen of England approximately so: you, the silly woman, put interests of trade above the state interests, and you are a servant of your merchants.

Je ne suis pas Charlie

A world-wide known (since January 7, 2015) French caricature magazine Charlie Hebdo has just become a reason for another huge storm. They published a set of images mocking the poor Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi.

Here are the images on the cover and somewhere inside of the recent issue, as they were republished by Morocco World News.

It looks like the sentence "Je ne suis pas Charlie" — which means "I am not Charlie" in French — is one of the most popular in Facebook today.

However, I am 100 per cent sure within the last 8 months the magazine has not changed at all. Neither did people of the species homo sapiens, I am equally sure about that. In fact, I would rather put under question the very definition "sapiens", though it's a topic of another discussion.

I just wonder, how many of those who say today they are not Charlie, 8 months ago claimed they were.

No Amnesty for Hypocrisy

In their recent news release, the Amnesty International inform about current situation with Syrian refugees.

Refugees in the region

More than 4 million refugees from Syria (95%) are in just five countries Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt:

• Lebanon hosts approximately 1.2 million refugees from Syria which amounts to around one in five people in the country
• Jordan hosts about 650,000 refugees from Syria, which amounts to about 10% of the population
• Turkey hosts 1.9 million refugees from Syria, more than any other country worldwide
• Iraq where 3 million people have been internally displaced in the last 18 months hosts 249,463 refugees from Syria
• Egypt hosts 132,375 refugees from Syria

RFE/RL Has Gone Too Far

Today is September 1.

Among many events, that happened in history on this day, it was 11 years ago that a group of terrorists captured hundreds of schoolchildren and some adults oin the town of Beslan (North Ossetia/Russia).

Here is how the RFE/RL, "Radio Svoboda" remembers this bloody event.

The text accompanying a photogallery of Andrey Korolev, is pretty short, just two sentences.

On Septemder, 1 it will be 11 years since terrorists captured hostages in school No. 1 of Beslan (North Ossetia). Three days later as a result of the assault on the school, 314 hostages were killed, including 186 children.

Historic Fail

Recently Ukraine celebrated its Independence Day.

I am not going into thin matters of how funny (and tragic at the same time) it sounds for me as an ex-Soviet citizen. I just wuold like to draw your attention to one of the tweets with which Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko celebrated the day.

Ukraine existed, exists, and will exist. And Novorossiya is a Tolkien's myth called Mordor.

He wrote it in Ukrainian, but our languages are so close that there's absolutely no trouble for me to translate it.

The matter is that the word Novorossiya (literally, New Russia) officially appeared in 1764, when Russian empress Catherine the Great established the Novorossiya governorate on the lands conquered during Russo-Turks wars.

Hell's Lifehack

A young woman (she's as real as you and me; I know her personally) living now in Donetsk region, writes in her LiveJournal:

Twig As a Door Lock

When there's a shelling, I take the locking bar off my door and change it with a twiglet. Why? There were lots of cases when doors got jammed during shellings and people could hardly get out. And how many deaths are unknown just because they failed? So, put a twig instead of your metal locking bar. It will be either a blast wave that breaks it, or myself. Thus, correspondingly, we shall survive :-)

It's My Life

Being born in 1970, for the first 21 years of my life I was a Soviet citizen, that is, a citizen of the USSR. As such, I went through all the stages form an infant to schoolchildren to a conscripted soldier to a University student — the Soviet way. Surely and undoubtedly, this background has much to do with who I am now. And many of my compatriots who have gone through more or less the same way.

My friend Phil Butler insisted I had to share the experiences of my life. I did.

My sincere hope is that it helps our so sadly imperfect world to be a friendlier place.

Because mutual understanding is the first and maybe the most important key to peaceful coexistence. We are all different — but that's normal, just natural. And the world evidently needs more tolerance. Not just that to sexual choices, but a wider one — to ideas, ways of life, traditions and beliefs, so far these do not threaten other people and nations.

I did not include all the details in my text: it is an online article, not a kind of "War And Peace". But in case you have any questions, or you'd like me to throw more light on this or that part of our former life, feel free to ask. You can also get some more information about me in some of my posts here, tagged "me & my background".

I am here (and there, in the "Our Russia") to answer. To build up understanding.

The Crimeans Are Happy

... right where they are. That is, with and in Russia.

So states Forbs' Kenneth Rapoza based on Gallup and GfK data in his short, but pretty cognitive article published quite a while ago, this March.

One year after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, poll after poll shows that the locals there — be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tatars are mostly all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine.

Little has changed over the last 12 months. Despite huge efforts on the part of Kiev, Brussels, Washington and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the bulk of humanity living on the Black Sea peninsula believe the referendum to secede from Ukraine was legit. At some point, the West will have to recognize Crimea’s right to self rule.

Gallup and GfK are among the most respected opinion researchers of the Western world, and they do not suffer from any pro-Russian bias.

Kenneth Rapoza: "One Year After Russia Annexed Crimea, Locals Prefer Moscow To Kiev". Enjoy the reading, the truth is short enough and won't take more that 5 minutes of your precious time.

Mainstream Media at Work

An image that says it all.

And it's not only Ukraine. Reading (or watching, or listening to) Western media, you'd be always aware that you may be getting quite a perversed image of reality.

It is surely not an easy job to think different under a coordinated pressure of mass media of US and EU that turned long ago into media of mass disinformation; yet it well worth giving a try. Being a human, not just a being.