Here's the good news about driving in Russia: You won't be doing it yourself.

Here's the bad news about driving in Russia: You won't be doing it yourself.

When I say this, I mean absolutely no disrespect to the wonderful drivers who helped me on my two adoption journeys. But there is something unsettling about being a backseat passenger on unfamiliar roads, especially when the roads are covered with potholes and you are traveling them at high speed. And even if that sounds like a cab ride in New York City, you probably haven't done... more

No matter what your strategy for flying safely to and within Russia, at some point you will be faced with another safety dilemma: driving in Russia. I thought I'd take two posts to talk about some of the current issues in Russian road safety and five things you can do to stay safe while traveling by car.

As Russia's economy has ballooned, so has the car and... more

Maybe it was a blessing in disguise that more families were not traveling to Russia to adopt last year.

The International Air Transport Association released its annual safety report earlier today, and it showed that Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union had the highest airplane accident rate in the world last year. The association, which goes by the acronym IATA, said that the region had 8.6 Western-built hull losses per million flights, which was 13 times the global... more

Mama mia.

Yesterday, Aeroflot, the Russian carrier that is the backbone of nearly every adoption trip to Russia, made a surprise bid for Alitalia.

After I picked myself up off the floor, I called one of my old college roommates. She had worked for Alitalia for many years (or "Always Late In Takeoff And In Arrival", as she used to call it) and I knew she would get a kick out of the story. And indeed, we had some laughs about the potential for inflight service on an Aeroflot-Alitalia combination.

The... more

The other day, I got to take a virtual train trip across Russia, knowing that some of you may have real train rides while you travel to orphanages. But all of you will spend some part of your Russian adoption journeys traveling by air, and that can sometimes be disconcerting. Even more so when the nightly news contains a mention of an airplane crash in Russia, as happened last week.

I have made three round-trip flights to Russia for adoptions,... more

In part one of this series of posts on Russian air safety, I looked at Aeroflot then and now.

But Aeroflot is just one part of the Russian aviation world these days. When the carrier was reorganized after the breakup of the Soviet Union, hundreds of small regional carriers were created, although there's been some consolidation since. The current list of air carriers operating in Russia on Wikipedia has... more

In the previous posts on Russian air safety, I looked at Aeroflot's record as well as those of the carriers that were spun off after Aeroflot was reorganized. Some have good safety records, and some not.

So what can you do to check out the carrier you will be flying? Ask your agency which carriers fly to the region that is likely to... more

I traveled from Moscow to Vladivostok this morning, by train, in my slippers, on one cup of coffee and a bagel.

Let me explain. I had fallen down one of those Internet rabbit holes that happen when you start wondering what you could find if you typed a certain search into Google. I was looking for blogs that were well informed on Russian politics and its economy.

My search led me to a site called "snowsquare", which bills itself as "Urban postings from Moscow, Russia". And... more

Quick--click on this link and save the information here someplace in your adoption files. It is a story, written by Eric Taub of The New York Times, that contains the clearest instructions I've seen yet on using your cell phone overseas. But call up the story quickly because the Times puts stories into its archive fairly soon after they are published and then you'll have to pay... more

I was in my twenties when I went to work for The Wall Street Journal overseas, and there were days when I would come home shaking my head in disbelief. Civil unrest or violence would flare up in some part of the world, and the Journal would blithely editorialize that the problem could be solved by economic development or a progressive tax code. It seemed, to this younger me, completely out of touch.

Of course now I understand how right the Journal was, and that was why I was very heartened by Russian Prime Minister Mikhail... more