September 26 is the 70th birthday of Vladimir Voinovich (born 1932), one of the most influential dissident writers of the late Soviet era.

Gymnast Lyudmila Turishcheva was born on October 7, 1952—50 years ago. Turishcheva won every imaginable title in gymnastics, both on the world stage and nationally.

Actor Anatoly Papanov (1922-1987) would have turned 80 on October 31. Generations of Russian children associate his voice with that of the Wolf in the popular cartoon Nu Pogodi!  (“You just wait!”).

October 20 is the centenary of the birth of Mikhail Yanshin (1902-1976), a member of the “second wave” of MKhAT theater actors who made their debut when Konstantin Stanislavsky was director there.

September 16th is the 65th birthday of the aptly-named champion in free wrestling, Alexander Medved (medved means “bear” in Russian).

Dates and anniversaries that coincide with this issue.

On August 20, Vassily Aksyonov turns 70. The son of party leader Pavel Aksyonov and author Yevgeniya Ginsburg (Into the Whirlwind), Aksyonov spent part of his childhood in Magadan, where his mother was incarcerated.

July 1 would have been the 95th birthday of writer and poet Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982). Shalamov’s talented and revealing prose only saw the light of day six years after his death, when glasnost led to the publication of previously suppressed writers.

Russia’s most renowned living actor, Alexander Kalyagin, was born on May 25, 1942. He is also presently chairman of the Union of Theater Workers of Russia (in his second term).

Poet Robert Rozhdestvensky (1932-1994), a cult figure of Soviet and Russian poetry, would have been 70 years old on June 20.

Sixty-five years ago, on May 27, 1937, the writer Andrei Bitov was born in Leningrad. Widely considered one of the best Soviet writers of the 1960s, Bitov came to literature the hard way.