Tag Archives for Russia

The saint and the bear

Saint Seraphim feeding a bear outside of his hermitage (religious retreat) (from lithograph The Way to Sarov, 1903).

Crimeans told to stop stealing sand from beaches

Sand-thieves!

Officials in Crimea are warning people to stop stealing sand from tourist beaches, or else face a prison sentence.

The peninsula’s beaches are being targeted by people who remove the sand for use as free building material, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reports. At more remote beaches it’s being taken away by the lorry-load, the paper says.

“Everyone we catch at this needs to be prosecuted,” says Sergei Aksyonov, prime minister of Crimea’s Russian-backed government. “When people are stealing sand in broad daylight, what exactly are we doing about it?” According to the Tass news agency, Mr Aksyonov wants to get Russia’s FSB – the successor agency to the KGB – involved to help catch them.

Sand theft can hit local authorities finances hard. In February, a group of builders were charged with illegally removing more than 1bn roubles-worth ($15.4m; £10.6m) near Moscow.

Back from the dead: Russian man wakes up in morgue after too much drinking, goes back to party

Only in Russia…

A man in Russia’s Far East woke up in the morgue after having been declared dead, local media report. Before the incident, he had been doing vodka rounds with friends – and after the “miraculous awakening,” he went back to the party.

The man who was mistakenly taken for dead passed out after drinking too much, local Khasanskiye Vesti newspaper reported Wednesday.

[…]

His friends called an ambulance and medical staff hastily declared the man dead before taking him to the morgue, according to the daily. However, the man eventually came back to his senses (somewhat) – only to find himself in a mortuary freezer.

“That night the local morgue was filled to its capacity, the bodies were not only on the shelves, but also on the floor of the freezer room, where our ‘dead’ hero was allocated,” Aleksey Stoyev, a police spokesman, told the newspaper.

“At some point, the man woke up, failing to understand where he was. It was very dark and cold. In addition his brain was foggy due to the influence of alcohol. In the darkness, he felt someone’s completely cold limbs and in fear rushed to the door. But it was locked.”

He started screaming for help and pounding on the door. His calls drew the attention of the morgue’s guard, who reported the situation to the doctors. The latter thought that the guard was imagining things, according to the local report. Nonetheless, out of cautiousness the doctors called police.

Opening the door police were met by the ‘resurrected’ man who in panic ran out of the room, according to the department of criminal investigations. Police questioned the man and released him.

Returning to the place of the party, he found his friends were still drinking, but this time commemorating him. The person who opened the door was so shocked that he fainted, Hasanskie Vesti says. The commemoration ceremony was quickly revamped into a re-birthday party.

After the door-opener fainted, they should have called the ambulance for him, told them they had another dead body. 😉

Soviet Armored Vehicle Operates as Taxi in Russia

Awesome!

It might seem like an odd choice for a taxi, but the BRDM has a few advantages, like its spacious interior and its amphibious capacity that allows it to deliver passengers to any address across the Neva River. This is especially useful during the legendary ‘white nights’ in St. Petersburg during the summer, when bridges are raised every night to let big ships pass between Onega Lake and the Baltic Sea.