Russia’s been in the news these days, of course, because our current president has, at the very least, gotten his hands and arms up to the elbows soiled in the garbage pail that is Vladimir Putin’s nefarious complex of spies, computer hackers, assassins, moles, and money-lending plutocrats.
President Gag or one or more of his minions may not have sat down with V. Putin’s boys and uttered out loud the words, “Let’s steal the election,” but, most assuredly, the Kremlin’s tech geeks and psy-ops practitioners — for Russia’s own reasons — pulled enough switches and floated enough fictions to sway a gullible American electorate to vote for its first ever grifter-slash-borderline sociopathic leader.
So, what is Russia? We in this holy land think we know but, truth is, we don’t. Nor have we ever.
Buryat women in traditional garb.
Hoping to cast a ray of light on what W. Churchill once described as a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside of an enigma,” my guest this afternoon on Big Talk is big time Russophile Tristra Newyear. She’s written a brand new novel, The Tomb and the Stone, set in the Russian Buryat enclave in Central Asia. The Buryats, Tristra informs us…., well, tell you what, just tune in at 5:30pm on WFHB, 91.3 FM, for this week’s edition of Big Talk and you’ll find out what they’re all about.
As always, should you miss it, you can catch the link to this week’s podcast here tomorrow AM.
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If you ever get curious to learn more about Buryats and their neighbors, Caveat should still have quite a few remnants left from three Central Eurasian collections I bought a few years ago. Much of it is linguistic and in foreign languages, but there should still be quite a bit for the general reader in the area studies section.
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