For nostalgia, and a sad commentary on the way our media -- because it has become such a big business -- doesn't necessarily make decisions that serve the public, read Erika Niedowski's farewell from Moscow. She sent this piece to colleagues after it didn't make the final edit of the Baltimore Sun earlier this wek. Niedowski was filing the final report from The Baltimore Sun's Moscow bureau, closed after nearly 55 years. She writes:

The Sun, the second American newspaper in Moscow after the New York Times, was in business here for the launch of Sputnik and the Cuban missile crisis; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Mikhail Gorbachev's ground-breaking perestroika reforms; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the election of Russia's first democratically president, Boris N. Yeltsin; the free-wheeling chaos of Russia's early experiment with capitalism in the 1990s; and the succession of Vladimir Putin and the resurgence of a country awash in oil wealth.