Vozvrashcheniye - The Return (2003)

Another sample of boring movie with many awards. The movie has 28 wins and another 12 nominations,see IMBD for details, by the way IMDB point is 8.1 with 10 thousand votes, i don't know why.This film is simply boring, i did not get its message.

The Rise and Fall Of the Russian Oligarks

This two part nice documentary tells the story of Russian oligarks, how they became rich and powerful during Yeltsin era, with their own words most of the time.And how they lost part of their wealth and power during Putin period.Very nice material with some historical footage from 90s Russia.
It is also available on Google Video.

Kızıl Yıldızdan Hilale Haydar Aliyev'in Fırtınalı Hayatı

As the book title implies, the book is the life story of Haydar Aliev, second president of Azerbaycan Republic.The author mush have really tried hard to make this a book :) There is nearly no information in it,the book contains the longest preface i've ever seen in a book.

In fact the book has only one paragraph to say "Aliev raised to power with great help from Yuri Adropov and fall from power due to conflicts with Gorbachev" and Aliev is a good man.

That is all, you can not find any valuable info about his days in Politburo[he was a full member for a very long time] or his relationships with Turkey, power strugge with Elcibey, the Armenian wars...so little.

So they made a book out of a what otherwise would be a few pages booklet.Do not waste money on this.

This book made me wonder on Aliyev's life story.I will find a better book and read his life soon.

Pera'dan Beyoglu'na

This book is one of the unknown treasures.The book tells the story of buildings[houses,hotels,state buildings] including the history, achitectural properties, famous peoples lived there once....on the Tunel-Taksim path
The author is so succesfull that the book is very fun and fluent to read.

Same author also as another book,Son Istasyon Venedik where he tells his interrail memoirs but unfortunately I could not find it anywhere...

The Red Stuff - The True Story of the Russian Race for Space (2002)

Yet another unfamous but very nice documentary. The Red Stuff tells the story of Soviet Space Program. This is very unique and valuable since all documents on this subject deal with Sputnik,Soyuz and Gagarin. This documentary tells the story of other cosmonauts with nice soviet archieve footage and interviews with people who REALLY went to space.

See DVD info on amazon.com or on IMDB.
There is another documentary on Soviet Space Program named "Red Star in Orbit" which I mentioned here.