Largely unseen footage of the funeral and official mourning following the death of Soviet leader Josef Stalin is featured in a new documentary, State Funeral, by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa. It's being shown on Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. The mourning events were held at factories, on collective farms, town squares, and in meeting halls across the Soviet Union.
2019 revealed few bright spots in the media landscape of Current Time’s broadcast zone. The Baltics still top the non-profit Reporters Without Borders’ annual ranking of press freedom in the region, but with concerns raised about Lithuanian security institutions’ newfound ability to shut down media outlets deemed to pose a national security threat. Hopes for independent media Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine have not yet been entirely met, the report found. Meanwhile, the environment for indepe
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned predicting the economic future into a dice roll, but data from the International Monetary Fund suggests some potential trends to watch. Their forecast: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all members of the European Union, will encounter the largest reduction in economic growth, but also the biggest rebound in 2021. Ukraine will suffer more than Russia, but likely experience the same level of comeback.
Data may help track the scope of the coronavirus pandemic, but only up to a point. Behind each country's confirmed COVID-19 cases lies a set of variables that mean these numbers need to be taken in context.
With the numbers of COVID-19 infections rising rapidly, countries within Current Time’s coverage zone are responding in a variety of ways: everything from school shutdowns to border closures for travelers from Italy and China, two of the worst affected states. But how do their overall response capabilities compare? To find out, Current Time turned to the 2019 Global Health Security Index, completed by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Johns Hopkins University, and The Economist Intelligence Unit.
The Worldwide Spread Of The Coronavirus: The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11. This interactive map -- updated every hour -- monitors the spread of the virus.
“It used to be that they died sometimes.” That’s how Uktamjon Yusupov, the head of an Uzbek dynasty of tightrope performers, remembers the old days of darboz, or tightrope-walking, when little boys and men performed without a safety belt. But nowadays, that belt, and perhaps their father’s hand, appear still to be the only protection juvenile Uzbek tightrope walkers have. In this centuries-old tradition, they rank as the main crowd draw.
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.
Uzbekistan's president has warned citizens not to go into debt to pay for traditional weddings. One Uzbek man has spent 19 years working in Russia and saving for the marriages of his three children.
“Information sharing is power,” Internet pioneer Vint Cerf once said. And in Eurasia, it’s power that most states still want to control. The majority of countries in Current Time’s coverage zone received negative ratings in Freedom on the Net 2019, an annual, worldwide report from the Washington, DC-based rights watchdog Freedom House.
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