MM Recommends: 'Russia!' Magazine

I have a new favorite magazine. It's called Russia!, and it celebrated the publication of its second issue tonight at a bar called Pravda (of course).

Half toss-off joke and half serious journalistic enterprise, Russia! made headlines recently when it presented actor Viggo Mortensen its inaugural "Rolling 'R'" award for the best Russian accent in Hollywood. Though meant as a prank, the announcement drew so much press, "we had to make an actual award," says editor Michael Idov, whose day job is writing for New York. Mortensen is filming in France at the moment, but his agent was invited to the party to pick it up. As far as I know, he was a no-show.

Here are three more reasons to love Russia!:

1. The collection of children's drawings of Vladamir Putin, which includes a rendering, in crayon, of the Russian president in martial-arts togs, karate-chopping a character labeled "Inflation."

2. The feature on how Russians, post-Communism, went from nation of slackers to a nation of workaholics. In it, editor Kostya Penkov describes how he launched the Russian edition of Playboy using movable type meant for publishing in English. "So we had to wrack our brains coming up with Cyrillic headlines that we could spell out using Latin letters."

3. The merchandising. On its website, Russia! is offering two mugs for sale: a "Russophobe" mug for $15.30, and a "Russophile" mug for $16.72. Why the odd pricing? Ivan the Terrible was born in 1530, Peter the Great in 1672.