[Posting comments to Notes works again, but now I see links get dropped from the Notes version. You’ll have to go to the comment at Edward Slavsquat’s site to see the links: edwardslavsquat.substac….]

Dear Riley,

Thank you for sharing photos of Novgorod past and present with us. I think I started reading you three years ago when Marko Marjanović linked to this post of yours:

I had no idea I'd learn so much more about Russia over the past three years from you. In the Waste it is usually only depicted as an aggressor, not a place where people live. You have given your readers a rare glimpse into a Russia that is not Moscow or St. Petersburg, much less the caricature in the media - both mainstream and 'alternative'. Raw, unfiltered, unglamorous, real.

Your posts about Крестьянка magazine have stuck with me:

I wish I could flip through that lifetime supply of Крестьянка that you had to leave behind. I fear Americans imagine that everything written in Russian is either 'Commie propaganda' or high literature. Rather than «Не сменить ли прическу?» on women's hairstyles in 1984. Something I'll never see in a history book or a tourist brochure. A fragment of what the unknown villagers read.

Those villagers are now known to us thanks to you. We may never know their names, but at least we know what they look like. We know they existed.

When I look at the photos you post, I think of the photos I don't have. For some reason almost no family photos before the seventies have survived. And many of the people who lived through the age of the lost photos are gone. I tried to get an interview with one of the few survivors, but alas ...

Fortunately, Ekaterina did succeed in interviewing villagers ... and you posted the results:

Those were gold. The Institute is a mine. I hope you and Ekaterina can return there - and be with your children again.

In any case, you two have so much to teach us, and I'm so happy you've been posting so much since your return. Please don't feel pressured to keep up this rate of output. Rest if you can, and experience Egypt. I'd love to see more of it through your eyes eventually!