Sovok of the Week

At times, a Sovok that you may encounter will exhibit strange and perplexing
habits that cannot be explained by any conventional wisdom and common sense.
He/she will do things that any civilized person would find bewildering, unexplainable,
or just plainly weird. Of course, I am referring to a slew of superstitions
[...]

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About a year ago I heard about an interesting scam from Comrade Vadim. Apparently it was pretty popular some years ago to slip on a patch of wet floor at a supermarket, claim an injury and sue the unfortunate entrepreneurs. As a good sovok I admired idea, however it was still hard [...]

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Being a single woman in the Soviet capital, Moscow, it is common to come across
homo sovieticus or the male sovok on a daily basis. They work in all facets
of life from the trolley bus driver, to the local bomzh who wolf whistles
when he
[...]

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I was just reminiscing with my smoking buddy downstairs about a "meal" that I had 2 years ago in Yerevan: My Armenia office manager, Gagik, invited
me and my technical assistant Konstantin to "a traditional haash pot" breakfast
at a funky restaurant I had been to before (which I refer to as The [...]

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Every year in July any self-respecting bourgeois in Ann Arbor area packs his
suitcases and leaves the city for a week. Restaurants are closed, businesses
don’t operate. What is the reason of such a migration during a season when
visitors come to the city bringing coveted entertainment dollars?

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For four days every July, the small town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is host to one of the largest gatherings of sovokishness in the midwestern United States — the Ann Arbor Art Fair. Every year, half a million visitors descend on this quiet little town to wander through the crowded streets under the blazing [...]

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In the next few days we will post a photo report of the biggest gathering of
Sovoks in Michigan. Stay tuned … Here is a little teaser. In the meantime,
it looks like the Moscow Times, a newspaper that I used to translate articles
from
when
I was
a
student
at the Pedagogicheskiy Institut imeni Nekrasova in Kostroma published an article about
us! [...]

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It is said: “Laziness has no boundaries” just like river Volga, so it is not incidentally that some home-raised Russian
sovoks posses laziness of truly sagacious proportions. Laziness so great of
a quality that it is only matched by a Joe Doe using a stick to fetch his Cheetos
so that he [...]

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There is a small town of Nerekhta not far from my beloved city of Kostroma. The
town is small, dirty, and very parochial. Nothing ever happens there. Except
for the unfortunate accident a couple of weeks ago that propelled
the town into fame and glory. What is to blame for such [...]

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There’s an old sovok joke about Anastas Mikoyan, the perennial bureaucrat who served in the glorious Soviet state and party apparatus for more than half a century. Mikoyan was a crafty little Armenian with a giant moustache, and he was famous for being able to maneuver out of all sorts of tricky, sticky political [...]

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Rarely do we find a person that is such a perfect candidate for the Sovok of
the Week. We usually search in the darkest spots of the reality and the Internet
to
dig
out
a
character that would be worthy of being featured on our website with a distinguished
[...]

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Oh,
the world of loneliness! People seeking each other, hoping to find their
second half, have walks by the ocean, coffee in bed, and passionate nights.
We went searching for the ones that are [...]

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If you or your neighbors are clever enough to have rigged an illegal cable hookup, you’ve probably seen our official Sovok of the Week, tv personality John Edward, on the Sci-Fi Channel. The host of the inexplicably popular “Crossing Over,” and now a best-selling author, Edward is a two-bit carnival huckster who has managed [...]

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It is no secret that when a sovok is about to make any decision in his life, no matter how big or small, he must first consult the advice of others. Whether it’s question of buying a new car (”Should I get the Lada or the Zhiguli?”) or renting a movie (”Which should I [...]

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One of the wonderful things about coming to America as a teenager was an opportunity to discover a new world of risqu» literature. The watchful supervision of my parents and incommodious guidance of the Communist Party somehow managed to keep good portion of books from the World Library out of my reach. Besides [...]

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Every year, Neiman Marcus (NM) publishes a Christmas catalog of things that they
would sell you IF you have enough money. They might place a small airplane there,
a diamond-encrusted Dell laptop, or some other piece of hardware with the price
tag of millions.
 
A couple of years ago, as I was browsing the clearance [...]

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