This year’s Sosnovka conference was in the Altai region.

I’m writing from the Tsentralnaya hotel in the tsentr (center) of Barnaul.  We got back from Manzherok, the little place in the Republic of Altai where we held Sosnovka 2006, last night around 8 pm.  I believe we can all be proud of this Sosnovka.  There were (being the most inclusive) 45 participants, and I think I counted that 23 of them were there for the first time.  The level of discussion remained high, and while we didn’t have time to complete our action plan (Resolution of the Conference) for the coming year, the veteran Sosnovka folks are on the job.

One Sosnovka veteran – Dima Lisitsyn – complained at our evaluation session that there weren’t enough fights.  So, a peaceful Sosnovka, but not everyone’s ideal kind of Sosnovka.  Dima celebrated his 39th birthday on the day that the Natural Resources Ministry announced the cancellation of the positive decision on the Sakhalin II environmental impact assessment, so we toasted the health of the head of that ministry late late into the night. Sakhalin II is for the moment a frozen project, and criminal cases are pending for the experts who approved the EIA.

There were no bards at this Sosnovka.  Without Sergei Berezniuk and Vasilii Solkin we were at loose ends for guitar-accompanied ballads. Sasha Yermoshkin took up the slack however and did quite a bit of singing and performing in our slight spare time.  I mean, we went rafting, and there he was standing up in the middle of the raft singing and telling jokes.  Don’t worry, there are photos of everything.  Nobody fell in.

I have to finish getting ready for the flight to Moscow.  David and I arrive there 9:15 am, and he continues home and I go on to visit my old home city (for my year abroad) Novgorod.  Leah and Sibyl got seduced by the beauty of the Republic of Altai and have stayed on there to do some hiking.  I don’t know when they return.  If they will return.  It was really beautiful there- though a bit chilly and rainy.