A decade before the fall of tsarism, a little-known auction was held to sell off some of the crown jewels. Was it rigged?

Today marks the 185th birthday of the artist Ivan Shishkin, whose paintings evoke Russia's beauty and vastness. With a nickname like "Forest Tsar," his trees must be good.

A tour of ten distinctive Moscow monuments that goes a long way to summarizing the state of the art in Russia today.

Leading lights (and some not so leading) clash over the scope of government interference in the arts.

Photographer, painter, designer, and more, Alexander Rodchenko (born December 5, 1891) worked at the intersection of innovative art and radical politics. Here are 14 of his works. 

Vasily Kandinsky was a renowned abstract artist whose shapes and colors revolutionized twentieth-century modernist art. Here are 11 of his paintings in honor of his 150th.

The 11th International Festival of Landscape Art, Arkhstoyanie, took place on July 23-24 in Kaluga Oblast. We sent Nadezhda Grebennikova and Mikhail Mordasov to take a look.

July 25 is the 155th birthday of Apollinary Vasnetsov, who is both a renowned painter of medieval Russia and a fixture in the night sky.

Ballet great Rudolf Nureyev leapt out of Soviet jurisdiction and into the wider world of Western ballet on June 16, 1961. His leap was as much a political move as a dance move.

After you finish strolling St. Petersburg's Nevsky Prospect, you'll want to visit these five must-stroll streets in the Northern Palmyra, to get a feel for the rest of the city. 

St. Petersburg (or Leningrad) has always occupied a special place in the world of Russian music. Famous for its rich classical traditions, especially at the Mariinsky Theater, in the second part of the twentieth century St. Petersburg became the epicenter of underground and experimental music.

We know comparatively little about the relationship between Akhmatova and Modigliani, but sometimes a few pictures can speak volumes. In honor of Anna Akhmatova's birthday (June 11, old style; June 23 new style), we reprint this essay, originally published in Russian Life, Jan/Feb 2011.