In 1978, Bulgarian dissident and playwright Georgi Markov was leaving the BBC London office where he worked and heading home. Waiting at a crowded bus stop, Markov felt a sudden sharp pain in his thigh and turned to see a large man bending down to pick up a black umbrella. The man apologized in a thick foreign accent and hopped into a taxi. Markov found a growing red pimple where he had felt the sting, and came down with a fever that night. Four days later, he was dead, the victim of one of the most diabolical assassinations in modern history — the Umbrella Incident.

Avos. “Perhaps.” “God willing.” “Hope against hope.” Pushkin baptized his fellow Slavs with this very phrase in Eugene Onegin: “Perhaps, o people's Shibboleth…” In Goncharov’s Oblomov, the spineless protagonist can barely splutter a sentence without its invocation: “And perhaps Zahar will contrive something…let's hope they'll manage without turning me out…well, things will be arranged somehow!" It is said that few words characterize the Russian outlook as succinctly as avos—a compact expression of the belief that, against all reason, something good might still turn up. So it should come as no surprise that the word eventually morphed into the avoska—the USSR’s portable, fishnet shopping sack.

Kids' literature tends to reveal as much, if not more, about a culture as the grown-up stuff. While American children feast on rags-to-riches stories like Cinderella, their German peers thrill to Grimm tales such as “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forward to Learn What Fear Was.” So it's fitting that the most popular children’s characters to arise from the U.S.S.R.—Cheburashka and Gena—are steeped in wistfulness and melancholy.

You may recall a short scene from the 1995 film GoldenEye, starring Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, in which 007 travels to Russia to meet up with a bumbling CIA agent played by Joe Don Baker. While the agents talk, Baker bangs at a squat little blue vehicle with a sledgehammer to start the engine. “Nice car,” Bond sniffs. The American replies, “She’s an ugly little bitch, but she gets you there.” Little did Western viewers know that this “ugly little bitch” was one of the Soviet Union's most recognizable, loved, and ridiculed cars: the Zaporozhets.

Russia’s military has a new unmanned drone — The Pchela-1, or if translated, “The Bee” — and it looks kind of a like a Nintendo Wii-inspired take on a military apparatus. With its charming, family-friendly vibe and sharp design, this critter puts the “cute” back in “surveillance aircraft.” We feel pretty good about something so adorable potentially hunting us down like wild, helpless prey with nowhere to hide.