News on travel, protests, Balashikha, a crooner, and the growing loan bubble.

On September 28, 1989 – just a few months after Boris Yeltsin's triumph at the Congress of People’s Deputies – the police found a muddied and wet Yeltsin near a dacha community outside Moscow.

“Mother Russia” is much more than a stereotype. Everyone has opinions on it, Russian rock musicians included.

As opposition protests rock Moscow, we look at how contemporary artists have interpreted the actions of Russia's riot police.

In which Communists hate Georgian food, a cross is accidentally paved over, and the King of Spades rules Russia.

News and brief items from around Russia.

There’s lots of ways to have fun, whether it be a patriotic holiday or an “unpatriotic” game.

Pavel Lungin’s controversial film Братство is nothing new, but its political context is — and that’s what makes it so dangerous.

There is never a shortage of political-cultural land mines on which to trod when one’s brief is to cover all things Russian.

In the spring of 1989, elections were held: “alternative elections.” This redundant phrase, which today provokes smirks, back then had everyone in a state of euphoria. We had a choice!

"A classical authoritarian power... does not pay that much attention to what the population thinks, and when it does, this attention is usually limited to a bunch of platitudes loudly proclaimed as the official ideology..."

A poem by Maxim Amelin, translated by Derek Mong and Anne O. Fisher.