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(You have questions?)

Is it cold there?

You bet. Saint Petersburg has 120 yearly snow days. And, we are still far from Siberia.

Most Russia suffers from a bitter freeze, nine months in a year. Temperature as low as -90 degrees (in Fahrenheit) are recorded in some regions. Just imagine: 90 below!

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How many languages are spoken in Russia?

More than 100 languages are registered in Russia. Russian is the official federal language. However, different ethnic groups use their own, in internal affairs.

Russian is written in Cyrillic, an alphabet different from ours. To my unexercised eyes, the most striking characters of the Cyrillic alphabet are bells and inverted 3s.

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Whatever happened to the KGB?

The KGB (short for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, meaning State Security Committee) was the equivalent of the CIA plus the FBI, in the Soviet era. It was dismantled after the breakup of the USSR, split into five smaller organizations by Yeltsin.

Today, the FBS (Federal Security Services) assures Russian homeland security. And, the SVR is the Foreign Intelligence Service.

Nota Bene: Current Russian President, Vladimir Putin, is a former executive/operative of the KGB.

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Is racism a problem in Russia?

At the time of the Soviet Union, racism was opprobrium, a thing from the decadent West. Anti-racism was a staple of the communist platform.

However, since 1991, in capitalist Russia, skin headed white supremacist groups have been on the rise.

Issa Sidibe, an attaché of the Guinea Embassy in Moscow, whom we met at the Kremlin, told us of sad stories of Africans? bodies found in subways in the morning. But, these crimes have receded over the last few years.

From my own standpoint (very Polaroid snapshot), Russians are much more comfortable with minorities than I have seen it in the U.S and in other Western capitals. True that racist nuclei may be in action, but the largely pervasive aura of inferiority and criminality attached to the minorities in countries with slavery past is not found in Russia, or in Eastern Europe in general. Racial profiling is not an electoral issue.

I would not call Russians friendly to foreigners and minorities. I would call them curious, puzzled, an attitude quite obvious at the restaurants, shopping centers, museums, night-clubs I visited?

Please, visit http://www.jeanlouie.com/

(The Traveller, Wednesday, June 25, 2003)