Russian civil servants' official literature distributor is spending more than $8,000 on books on alcohol and online gaming among hundreds of other titles.
The state firm Knizhnaya Expeditsiya, or Literary Expedition, describes itself as one of the country’s oldest book distributors for Russian civil servants.
On Tuesday the opposition-leaning Dozhd TV channel listed some of the titles among 650 books purchased recently for some 500,000 rubles ($8,560), citing a publicly available tender published on the government’s website. The titles included:
"Adventures in Minecraft" by David Whale and Martin O′Hanlon.
“Wine, Infusion and Moonshine. Best Recipes” by Yulia Luzhkovskaya.
“The Drunken Botanist. The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks,” by Amy Stewart.
“How Not to Die,” by Michael Greger and Gene Stone.
“The Psychology of Conscience: Guilt, Shame and Remorse,” by Yevgeny Ilin and the “Daily Anti-Depressant: Blue Cats” by Rina Zenyuk.
“Cherche La Oil. Why Do We Pay Tribute to America?” by Nikolai Starikov.
And “The De-NAZIfication of Ukraine: Country of Lessons Unlearned” by Armen Gasparyan.
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