Russian journalist Vadim Kondakov, a member of the Russian Academy of Television, is the creator of Unknown Russia.
As Russia heads into national local and regional elections on September 8, what do ordinary voters make of the country's 2019 summer of protest? Journalist Vadim Kondakov, host of Current Time’s Unknown Russia series, took to the streets in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Yekaterinburg to find out.
There's little work to be found in the dying villages of northwest Russia's Solovetsky Islands. But there's a rich crop of kelp just under the surface of the White Sea, and the farmers who harvest it say it's a tough but viable business. (From Vadim Kondakov's film The Gatherer (Ловец).)
In Russia’s northeastern Sakha-Yakutia region, nearly 8,470 kilometers east of Moscow, ice both provides a living and makes for a daunting barrier. The region’s supply corridor, the Lena River, is iced over for six months a year. That means that workers need to know how to cut through thick ice in winter to repair ships for the spring. Unknown Russia traveled to the town of Zhatay to learn how it is done.
Unknown Russia travels to Nizhny Arkhyz, high in the Caucasus Mountains, to see Ratan-600, the world's largest radio telescope, and BTA-6, a gigantic optical telescope considered a scientific marvel. The Soviet-era astrophysical observatory that contains the two telescopes supplies most of Russia's information about optical and radio astronomy, according to the Russian Academy of Sciences, but, today, struggles to overcome financial constraints.
