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Have you Heard?

Snowmen

We know how much you love the snow in Moscow, and we thought that you’d like to know some very interesting things about Russia’s favourite natural resource:

  • On average, 160 cm of snow falls in Moscow during one winter season. 
  • A record 177 cm of snow has fallen in Moscow since the beginning of this winter season, which has been one of the snowiest in the past few years.
  • An average of 45 million cubic metres of snow has to be removed from about 90 sq. km of the city’s territories during winter. 
  • For more than five years now, private businesses have been competing in a tender for maintaining the city’s territories. In a season it is possible to earn about 60 million roubles from the cleaning of just one small area.
  • It costs more than 70 million roubles to remove 1cm of snow from the city as a whole in a season. Since it is impossible to guess the exact amount of snowfall for the winter, Moscow city’s authorities spend a lot of time listening to the weather forecast. 
  • For this season, 9.2 billion roubles were allocated from the city’s budget to remove snow from the streets of Moscow. This money had to be used for buying chemical reagents and new equipment, repairing existing machines, paying salaries for road sweepers, and, of course, hiring private companies.
  • Private companies charge between 3000 to 3500 roubles for removing 20 cubic metres of snow (the quantity of snow that a standard KamAz truck can transport). 
  • On the first day of spring about 15 cm of snow fell in the city.
  • Not less than 20 cm of snow is forecast to fall in Moscow in March.

Wonderpark

Moscow’s favourite sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, the President of the Russian Academy of Arts, is building WonderPark, a Russian version of DisneyLand, in Nagatinskaya Poima, an area by the Moscow river in the North-East of the city.

The theme park will use up 300 hectares of green space, and will be three times larger than DisneyLand.

Tsereteli described the project “as a grandiose fairy world ruled by several characters.” Those personalities are still being kept a secret. The park will feature five theme zones according to the number of continents on our planet. There will also be a Tree of Life depicting all of the world religions. Construction is planned to be carried out in several stages and will take up to seven years. The cost of the first stage is estimated at 450 million USD.


A Star is Born

Coming soon to a television near you, Zvezda (Star) TV channel! Confused? Lessons in patriotism are now available from the Defence Ministry of Russia, with its new TV channel called Zvezda (Star).

“The ideology of the channel is simple. In order to defend, one has to love,” said Sergei Savushkin, general director of the new channel. Zvezda will broadcast Soviet-era war movies and documentaries, and only Russian-made programmes, including the Ministry’s own archives of historical film, as well as children’s and family shows.

In terms of operation, Zvezda won’t be any different from other channels – it will sell ads, seek sponsorship and sell its own programming. But even the ads will promote exclusively Russian products, mainly from the military industry. “We want to have war veterans, as well as young people watching our channel, but the channel is aimed mostly at men,” a Ministry official said. Broadcasting started exactly at 1300 hours on 21 February. For a while Zvezda will shine only from TV tubes in Moscow and the Moscow region, but there are plans to expand it into other regions.

Just recently, a leader of the Russian Orthodox Church announced that the church also wanted to start a channel of its own.







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