I found the mother lode of information on Russia last night.

It's called "Sher's Russian Index", and it is a portal to all things Russian--art, culture, sports, science, language and much, much more. Well, there's not a section on adoption, but I can forgive its creator that because of all the other material that's here.

A word on the site's creator. He is one Benjamin Sher, and after a bit of sleuthing, I learned that he is a Russian translator by profession. His main Web site contains... more

When you travel through Russia on your adoption trips you will see them: neat little garden after neat little garden, all laid out to take maximum advantage of the sun, which will soon begin beaming on them almost 24 hours a day.

Some of these gardens are attached to dachas, the country houses and plots given out to city workers in Soviet times to boost the nation's food supply. (I found an interesting piece on the history of dachas here.) Some are quite simply a country... more

If you live in or near Washington, D.C., then you get to enjoy the first event on this month's calendar of Russian art, music and dance in America. Tonight at 6 p.m., the Kennedy Center will host "TransAtlantic Duo". Alexander Paperny plays the balalaika and Vladimir Fridman contributes guitar and vocals to a program that promises Bach, klezmer, jazz and traditional Russian music.

If you attend Vassar College or know someone who does, you have a crack at... more

I finally carved out a few days to get started on reading Anna Karenina (and I see from the forum posts that a few of you have too). And I ran smack into the problem that made it so hard to read the book the last time around: the names.

As I wrote earlier this year, meeting one Russian means having to learn a whole lot of names. There's a first name,... more

After I finished writing this morning's post on Simply June, the business that Karen June Grant started as her Russian adoption was progressing, it occurred to me that it was time to dust off some material I had been saving on Matryoshka dolls. The Russian nesting dolls figure on Karen's onesies and she... more

Before the summer of 2004, Karen June Grant was just one of those gifted crafters we all get to meet from time to time. "Just"? No, that's not the right way to put it: The woman has panache.

But that summer Karen began to evaluate her main source of employment, graphic and Web design. Like many of us, she took what I've come to call a "momventory" because she and her husband were going to adopt from Russia. "As we started to get closer... more

Every day is Earth Day in our house.

It's not just because I brought my kids out of the country that has the fourth-largest impact on global warming and moved them to the country that is the biggest culprit. Taking care of the Earth simply makes sense because it is our one and only planet. And since my kids, by virtue of their adoption, are already global citizens, I'm hoping they can be in the vanguard of the global citizens trying to turn the world's pollution... more

Since I was prepping for an Earth Day presentation at church, I decided to spend a few minutes looking at the state of the environment in Russia, too. Today, I'm going to turn what I learned into two posts: Russia's eco-profile and my thoughts on raising environmentally responsible kids who were born there, but now live here.

Some of Russia's current ecological state is the legacy of the Soviet Union: Its economy, like many others in the developed world,... more

In the arts and cultural events calendar that I put up at the beginning of the month, I noted that there was going to be a big sale of Russian art at Christie's in New York mid-month. Well, if one picture is worth a thousand words, then the results of this sale--and a similar sale at Sotheby's--say more about the state of Russia's economic development than several hundred copies of Anna... more

Folks, we have some time to kill here.

The Ministry of Education's call for more paperwork at the end of March and the subsequent expiration of all accreditations means we have to wait to get the referrals coming again. We might as well use it productively.

So here's my proposal: An online book club on Anna Karenina. At 864 pages in paperback, it definitely has enough heft to keep us reading for a while. (After all, it took author Leo Tolstoy four years to publish it all!) And there is nothing more emblematic of... more