Moscow Is Burning

As Moscow is afflicted by heat waves and smoke from neighboring forest fires, Russians are sometimes at a loss. The countries cultural wisdom turns on surviving the cold (with vodka), not the heat. “A Siberian adage has it that, ‘Forty degrees below zero is not a frost, and forty-proof vodka is not real vodka.’ But is forty-degree-centigrade (104 Fahrenheit) heat not real heat? No one has bothered to devise a proverb for it, because in northern or central Russia it almost never happens. Heat waves and even smoke from wildfires (often from burning peat bogs) have engulfed the city before, but never like this.”