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Top 5 Russian Blog Posts of 2019 Posted by on Dec 30, 2019

laptop

I hope everyone who celebrates Christmas or other holidays in December had a great time with their loved ones. As we near the end of 2019, I would like to look back and share our top five most popular posts. Back in the USSR? The first post talks about a survey that discovered that many…

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Top 10 Russian Verbs — Part II Posted by on Dec 24, 2019

glasses

We are continuing our list of the most common verbs in Russian. Make sure you read Part I, too! 6. Cтать — to become, to start Стать is a perfective verb and refers to the result of becoming something or someone. Think of the game “Кто хочет стать миллионером?” (literal translation, “Who wants to become…

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Give or Take: Russian Verbs with -давать Posted by on Nov 14, 2019

giving

It may be useful to learn words in related “families,” so let us look at several verbs that share their root with дава́ть [dɐˈvatʲ], to give. I will include the imperfective and perfective forms of the verb and any related nouns for each verb. This post does not cover every verb or every possible meaning…

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Russian Recipe: Beet Salad with Garlic and Walnuts Posted by on Nov 6, 2019

beet salad

When we talk about Russian cuisine, the same dishes keep coming up—Olivier salad, borsch{t} (arguably of Ukrainian provenance), pelmeni, etc. This time, let’s make a lesser-known—but delicious!—dish popular in Russia: a beet salad. You may remember that beets (свёкла) feature in some other Russian dishes, such as the already mentioned borsch, vinegret, and “herring under…

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Autocomplete Question: “Why Is Russian Life Expectancy So Low?” Posted by on Oct 17, 2019

elderly couple on a bench

We are continuing our Autocomplete Questions series — these are questions that pop up in your search bar when you start typing. This time, I put in “Why is Russian…” and one of the questions read “Why is Russian life expectancy so low?” Let’s tackle this question in this post. Some Statistics First, how low…

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5 Russian Books That Were Banned in the Soviet Union—Part II Posted by on Sep 30, 2019

bookshelf with books

Last time, we looked at several Russian books that, for various reasons, never saw the light of day in the Soviet Union or sometimes in their author’s lifetime. Some of these books were initially snuck out and published abroad and only came out in Russia in the late 1980s or early 1990s. 4. Мастер и…

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5 Russian Books Banned in the Soviet Union—Part I Posted by on Sep 23, 2019

hands typing on a typewriter

Some of the books that have entered the Russian literary canon were virtually unknown in Russia until the late 80s or the 90s. These books were either outright banned from publication or were only available as bootleg copies—famously as homemade samizdat (самизда́т) copies. Here are five books that are mainstream now but were out of…

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