No need to worry about the carbon footprint of Uzbekistan's ancient technique for preserving winter melons. Its special "kovunkhona" storage chambers have no automatic cooling systems at all. Instead, they just rely on cold outside air and centuries of local experience keeping melons fresh until spring.
Georgia’s governments have repeatedly declared war on poverty, but in the 300-person village of Davitiani, like in other villages in this would-be European Union member, a lack of income and lack of infrastructure remain daunting problems. To get officials’ attention, Davitiani, a predominantly ethnic Russian settlement located in the eastern vineyard region of Kakheti, is now considering an unusual option: a boycott of Georgia’s October 2020 parliamentary elections.
The native Nenets reindeer herders of Russia's Far North are determined to preserve their traditional way of life despite population shifts, market changes, and perceived threats to their ancestral territory. But as reindeer herders start to vanish, this community faces a daunting tussle with time.
In the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, about 200 people work in shifts to search through the ash dump of a heating plant. Desperately poor, they are looking for unburned pieces of coal to sell. It's hard work, but the only way to make a living for many of them during the winter.
It's a kind of no-man's-land: three Ukrainian villages lie beyond their country's last border post on the road to Belarus, complicating life for the inhabitants who must pass through border checks to enter their own country.
It's not just open-pit mines that depend on Kyrgyzstan’s gold wealth. In the frigid, central region of Naryn, one of the Central Asian country's poorest areas, specks of gold in an iced-over river help four men to survive and support their families.
Current Time gained exclusive access to a closed village near a Russian military facility where five people died after an explosion and radiation leak. Residents of Nyonoksa have spent their lives in the shadow of a weapons test site, and while some are unworried, others say there's been a lack of information about possible health risks.
Nazi occupation and Soviet repression decimated the Izhorian people, a tiny ethnic minority from northwest Russia. Now just hundreds remain, but efforts are being made to revive their language and culture.
In southwest Russia, just west of the Volga River, lies an ordinary-looking town with an extraordinary background: Shikhany is the presumed birthplace of the military nerve agent Novichok, used in the 2018 poisoning of ex-Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the United Kingdom. No longer a secret location, Shikhany’s several thousand residents can now publicly discuss Novichok’s past. Current Time’s Unknown Russia traveled to Shikhany to hear their storie
A building in Irkutsk, Siberia, looks more like a fridge in need of defrosting than a home. Yet several families, with children, live here, saying local authorities have neglected them. An official said they must prove that they have the right to live in the building before they can be rehoused.
Pictures of Pripyat, the abandoned town near Chernobyl, are world famous -- but Ukraine has another nuclear ghost town. Orbita was built for workers at the Chigirinsky nuclear plant. The workers moved in, but the plant was never finished, and Orbita is now a crumbling ruin with just 100 inhabitants.
Navigating a Russian city in a wheelchair is incredibly difficult -- and the challenge is even greater in the middle of winter. One disability activist in the Siberian city of Tomsk says government projects intended to improve accessibility have largely failed to deliver on their promises.
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