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Thank you. Greetings, comrades.

Now, some of you might find this subject weird, but I know that cafe culture is huge in some of the places that you live in.

This goes for my European listeners mostly,

but I have some interesting stories right here just about how it was like for an average Soviet citizen

to spend a nice evening in a cafe with their friends.

Yeah, I also know the yearning of this COVID era.

And to be honest, at the moment, I just want to be as far from politics as humanly possible.

Oh, and I haven't finished the Alaska book just yet.

But I have a lot of things to do outside of the show. I've been approached by some

folks in China who've liked me to do personalized history courses for some people, and that

requires quite a lot of paperwork, and I thought a Back to the Roots episode would be amazing, and fit right in at this point, really.

First of all, cafes as such were extremely rare.

They, for one, existed only in the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuaria, Estonia,

and also they were there in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Everywhere else, they only basically had Colchol's associated bistros.

In Russia proper, besides larger cities, there were no cafes.

Like I said, either restaurants or bistros.

And I'm saying bistro, when the proper closer term, would mean eatery.

A kind of a diner, if you will, but please, no images of American one here from the 50s

or something.

More closer would be something from the whole high school movies or prison movies or something

...