Lisa Dickey - Bears in the Streets

In fact, we endured one of the most stressful moments of the 2005 trip here, when David’s laptop got knocked off a wobbly stool—the only free spot he could find to put it on—and refused to boot back up. I was on the brink of panic when David managed to pop the thing open, fiddle around with a tiny screwdriver, and get it working again. “How did you do that?” I asked him. “I have no idea,” he said.

Russia has 22 autonomous republics, mostly in regions having large non-Russian ethnic groups, such as Tuva, Chechnya, and Dagestan. Republics have their own constitutions and can declare their own official languages.

Unveiled in 1970 in celebration of Lenin’s one hundredth birthday, the head has been described in various printed reports as cross-eyed; Buryat in its features; and Jewish, because the snow that collects on its head resembles a yarmulke.

The Kovboi, or “Cowboy,” is decorated with American-style touches, such as big black-and-white photographs of Clark Gable and Jayne Mansfield, and a giant statue of a cowboy in a checked shirt, wraparound shades, and a ten-gallon hat.

The Old Believers are a religious sect that splintered off from Russian Orthodoxy in the seventeenth century. There are numerous Old Believers villages scattered throughout Buryatia, including the village of Tarbagatay, which offers tourist excursions and, oddly for a religious sect, homemade liquor for sale.

I wasn’t keen on having the farmer’s son stumble across photos of my big gay wedding, but it was too late to worry about that. Also, for as nervous as I’d been at the beginning of the trip, now I pretty much expected everyone in Russia to parrot some variation of the line, “I’m OK with it, but don’t tell anybody else.”

I was not.

Mollusk scientist. I’d never heard of this word until Tanya taught it to me.

The study of inland waters. Don’t worry, I didn’t know this one either.

The Shaman Stone is a large rock protruding from the water at the mouth of the Angara River, just west of Listvyanka. Some people believe it has mystical powers, one of which is apparently the ability to draw fee-paying foreigners to look at it.

For most of the year, the buses travel from Olkhon to the mainland via ferry—the same ferry that Gary and I had waited for in MRS back in 1995. In deepest winter, however, when Baikal is frozen, the buses drive directly across the ice.

Not only does Yura Alekseev paint underwater landscapes, he is actually underwater while he paints them. He’s one of a handful of artists in the world who don scuba gear, then carry canvases and paint under the water to create their art.

It was Tanya.

Sex between women was not outlawed, presumably because lawmakers either (a) didn’t believe it existed, or (b) considered it more titillating than threatening.

Communalkas were Soviet-era apartments shared by multiple families, with common kitchens and bathrooms. They were crowded and lacked privacy, but they also gave rise to classic jokes, such as: “A woman was taking a bath in the communalka when a man cracked open the door. ‘Get out!’ she screamed. ‘I’m just making sure you’re not using my soap!’ he yelled back.”

Among Zhirinovsky’s greatest hits: his proposals to reclaim Alaska and ship the Ukrainians there; to turn the Baltic States into a nuclear waste dump for Russia; and to flood the United Kingdom by dropping nukes into the Atlantic Ocean. He has publicly stated a desire to see the Russian empire expand to where Russian soldiers can “wash their boots in the warm water of the Indian Ocean,” and, in 2014, he advocated the rape of a pregnant journalist.

It would later be surpassed by Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Thousands of tiny fragments of the meteor were found in the area around Chelyabinsk, many of which were boxed up and sold as souvenirs.

He started out as MC Pavlov, then changed it to MD&C Pavlov, though now the two names appear to be interchangeable. For the sake of consistency, I’ll call him MC Pavlov from here out.

At the time, there were an estimated 40,000 “Afro-Russians” in all of Russia, just 0.02 percent of the population.

In 1959, in what would have made a beautiful TV commercial, Vice President Richard Nixon urged Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to try a sip of Pepsi at an exhibition of American products in Moscow. Khrushchev loved it, and in 1972, the USSR struck a deal to manufacture and sell Pepsi in Russia in exchange for PepsiCo’s agreement to import and sell Russian vodka in the United States.

Payment in hard currency was intended to guarantee a stability the ruble couldn’t offer. There were other hard-currency stores in the Soviet Union, called Beriozkas , which sold souvenirs and imported goods.

The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, or TASS, was the main newsgathering organ in Soviet times.

Literally, “From Zvuki Mu.” Not to be confused with “The Brand New Zvuki Mu,” which is another offshoot of the original Zvuki Mu band.

In 1989, near the end of the Soviet era, the census showed that 64 percent of Soviets had completed secondary education, while 23 percent had completed higher education.

For the handful of people who haven’t encountered the story: the man notices that during most of his life, there are two sets of footprints in the sand, but in the most difficult times, there’s only one. When he asks why God abandoned him during his difficulties, God replies, “My son, it was then that I carried you.”