Comments in this thread are kind of trippy but also so heartwarming to read. I was born in independent Ukraine but, unsurprisingly, I studied math and physics with the help of all of those Soviet handbooks: Perelman, Irodov etc, basically all of them are household names.

It's amazing to realize that somebody from a totally different culture, continent, language, was slouching over the same problems as I was, maybe even at the same time.