According to a much quoted Russian saying 'the country has two eternal problems, roads and idiots'.

There is always an element of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian people, and without it their happiness is incomplete - Dostoyevsky

[it was] perceived that it was easier to rise upwards east of the Urals. A man who left Russia as a common soldier became a sergeant in Tobolsk, a captain in Yakutsk and a colonel in Kamchatka.

You can only appreciate the engineering feat of the Trans-Siberian railway by travelling along it in winter. They might as well have laid tracks across Antarctica.

The Soviet period was a disaster, not least because supply lines were so long and so corrupt that little was left by the time goods reached the Russian Far East except things nobody wanted, such as the fabled ten thousand left-foot gumboots. (On that occasion, transport planning failed to the extent that the 10,000 left boots went in the opposite direction to the same number of right boots, heading nobody knew where).

Their lives were and are consumed with the generally dreadful business of being Russian.

Russian's claim the banya as their first doctor, vodka being the second and raw garlic the third.

We stopped for the driver, Sergei, to take a bathroom break in the woods. He had taken a dislike to me. 'What would you have done', he asked, 'if it were minus thirty, which it might well have been, and you were wearing those light trousers?' I said that the fabric was high-tech and I had worn the trousers in the Arctic, and showed him my merino leggings underneath, and two pairs of thermal socks. at this news he changed tack. 'Far too much for this mild weather'.