PIcture of The Day: Spasiba!

A room (kolhata) to rent advertisement in a newsagents window, King’s Lynn. The text is in Russian cyrillic and deliberately designed to appeal to prospective East European migrants tenants of a certain age. Anyone who went to school behind the Iron Curtain before 1991 learned Russian as part of the curriculum, and as part of the USSR’s cultural domination of its occupied territories. Although widely loathed and abandoned after the fall of communism, the practise of having a common language proved useful for migrants when those countries joined the EU under the A8 accession rules in 2004 and…