Thanks to our Puppet-in-Chief, everyone's talking about Russia these days. But how much do you actually know about Russia? How much of what you know is just left over from the old Cold War frame of thinking?

This coming Saturday at 6 pm, Fantagraphics Books, University of Washington, and Short Run are bringing Russian cartoonist/journalist Victoria Lomasko to the Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery in Georgetown. Lomasko will be presenting from and signing her new book of journalism, Other Russias.

Sophie Pinkham profiled Lomasko in a recent issue of the New Yorker:

Lomasko, who grew up in Serpukhov, a town in the Moscow region, has spent nearly a decade documenting the lives of ordinary people in provincial Russian cities, remote villages, and urban underbellies, the kinds of people who rarely make it into the press or the corridors of power, and who have little hope that life will get better. In her book, which is out this month from n+1 Books, we meet children so culturally and geographically isolated that they don’t even know that Moscow is a city, Kazakh migrant workers enslaved by a sadistic Moscow supermarket owner, and sex workers operating out of offices and vans in order to feed their husbands and children.

And last week, Lomasko appeared on The Takeaway in a primer episode about Russia.

This is a case of just the right writer showing up in Seattle at just the right time. Lomasko understands the situation in Russia better than any American pundit every could. Go soak up her knowledge, pick up her book, and find out what the hell's going on. The event is free, and it's part of Georgetown's monthly Art Attack artwalk, so there's plenty to do in that neck of the woods.