Global Voices Online

Darkness at Noon shares his observations about Minsk.

Scraps of Moscow writes about the Young Pioneers organization in Russia and Moldova.

Robert Amsterdam's blog - on the shutting down of the eXile - here and here.

A Soviet-time joke in a post at Robert Amsterdam's blog: “… the man who goes to buy a car in Moscow, pays for it, and is told by the salesman that he can collect it on a particular date in 10 years' time. The buyer thinks for a moment and then asks: ‘Morning or afternoon?' The salesman, astonished by the question, asks: ‘What difference does it make?' And the buyer answers: ‘Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.'”

FP's Passport starts a discussion on whether the U.S. basketball player who'll play for Russia at the Olympics is “a traitor or a savvy capitalist.”

At Polandian, “observations of the Polish character” by Scatts: “Some of them relatively new or recently reinforced, others very old but all have been openly discussed with a variety of Poles who, for the most part, agree with me. Those who don’t agree with me, tend to disagree with anything bad being said about Poles by any foreigner. Fair enough.”

Baltic reviews some of the signs of economic crisis in Latvia: lamps and veggies stolen from gardens, gas stolen from pumps and trucks.

The Economist's Ceratin Ideas of Europe blog welcomes exhibit ideas for a Cold War museum that may be built “on a site near the old ‘Checkpoint Charlie' border-crossing point in Berlin.” One reader suggests “a section on anti-communist humour.”

Desmond McGrath of A Fistful of Euros writes about football and politics: “Part of the fun of football is the way in which it overturns the international order of power politics.”