Во время испытаний межконтинентальной ракеты Р-9 мы из перископа заметили течь кислорода из шланга. Дали "отбой" на старт. Это очень опасно, возможен пожар. Руководитель испытательного центра Леонид Воскресенский взял двух инженеров и пошел к ракете. Мы смотрим в перископ: подошли, осмотрели, зачем-то спрятались за сарай, вышли - и Воскресенский ( Read more... )

As I was reading “Quiet Flows the Don” (which I highly recommend, by the way), I kept dreaming of the creepiest stuff - it’s a pretty violent book. One of the dreams was of a horrible car accident, where a man’s head was cut off. Now, the scariest thing was that the man didn’t die, and his head was really thirsty. So a nurse picked up his head and ( Read more... )

In the early 1990s my mom and I were traveling back to Petrozavodsk on a train. We had two beds in a four bed closed compartment. In the middle of the night a really drunk man with two halves of a ticket came in and kept us up all night with stories of times past. Neither we nor the conductors could do anything about it, so we had to listen to him ( Read more... )

As I am leaving Syracuse, strong wind blows cast away school papers through the empty town. Another stage of my life is coming to an end, and I am surprised at how fast it went by and how little material possessions I have accumulated. During this time, I took several excellent classes which were no doubt a highlight of my academic career - Russian ( Read more... )

This fact really went past me. Which is interesting because I hear more and more complaints about how kids these days are not taught history and don't know who Lenin was. Well, I knew who Lenin was all right, but I completely missed the fact that I no longer lived in the USSR. When we first came to the States in September 1992 (9 months after the ( Read more... )

So I read this somewhere and thought of it today for no apparent reason. We (and by "we" I mean people from the former Soviet Union, I guess) have always thought of Lenin as a little jumpy man. However, his contemporaries have described him as extremely slow. The reason for this mistaken perception lies in the poor quality of the cinematography of ( Read more... )

I went to California for the month-long winter break, good times. Tried skateboarding, rollerskating, ice skating, mountain skiing, all quite pathetically, but it was fun. Now back for last semester in Syracuse (didn't I just get here?...). I'm taking History of IR, Comparative Foreign Policy, German, and Micro. I also ended up auditing ( Read more... )

Итак, Вы - Джеймс Уилсон
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I just remembered a funny story, and before I forget about it again I'll write it up here for your amusement ( Read more... )

Whatever I was saying about missing assigned readings before was all a one huge lie...

Four weeks to go until the winter break!