Word: dachas
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Every August, Nikolai Gusev juices hundreds of unwashed apples which grow at his dacha, west of Moscow. For a month he waits patiently for the juice to ferment and turn into a wine. He then distills the mixture, and stores the remaining liquid in a barrel for several months. The result is a highly potent drink (45% alcoholic), with an apple aftertaste which is the favorite tipple of his friends. "I had too many apples at my dacha and instead of throwing them away I wanted to do something with them, for me making moonshine is just a little...
...were its fools and its roads. And even though the overall population of contemporary Russia continues to shrink by more than half a million people a year, fools appear to multiply as profusely as ever. Perhaps that's why whenever national elections are held, the polling station nearest my dacha (country house) is the local loony bin. As for the roads, each 40-mile drive here from Moscow confirms my suspicion that roads were in much better shape in Gogol's time. Today, they look as if World War II just ended, but not before a couple of Messerschmitts managed...
...driver and I heaved the stretcher on which my mother-in-law lay moaning into the ambulance, and off they went, down the same road on which Gogol might well have conceived his line about fools and roads. Our dacha is just a walking distance from the estate of Abramtsevo, owned in Gogol's time by the Aksakov family - literati who turned their home into an informal salon for the Russian intellectual gentry. As a dear friend of the Aksakovs, Gogol was a frequent and honored guest in Abramtsevo, now a museum and a major Russian landmark of Russian cultural...
...made up my mind about President Putin a few months ago, but it was only at the last minute that he sat down for an interview. So on a snowy Moscow day, our team left the city for the drive to Putin's presidential dacha. Despite the fact that President Putin knew he was potentially the Person of the Year, he made little effort to be agreeable. Charm is not part of his arsenal. I've spent a lot of time around politicians, but he's the first who didn't seem to care whether we liked...
...walked outside my dacha gate this morning, my friend Volodya was fiddling with his car. I asked what he thought of the coverage the Russian electronic media had been giving Putin as the magazine's choice. "What's that all about?," he asked, while fixing something in the engine compartment. "I was busy all day yesterday - first work, then picking up my kid from his nursery school, then running my wife's errands." I told him that the Russian President had been picked by TIME as the Person who made the deepest impact on this year's events. "I dunno...