Category Results

When he was a child, the author often overheard the hushed conversations of adults alluding to concentration camps in Yakutia. When he grew up, he went in search of them.

On September 17, 1715, in Moscow’s Sukharev Tower, home to the School of Mathematics and Navigation, an unusual book was put on public display: a calendar.

For lovers of Russian literature, Marina Mniszech is more literary figment than historical figure. Yet her life was truly interesting, from any angle.

The idea of a Holy Alliance was dear to Alexander’s religious heart. He believed that God would protect legitimate rulers. The Holy Alliance did not quite work out that way.

Every once in a while someone asks me how to translate a particular phrase, and my answer is not that it can’t be translated or that it is hard to translate, but that there’s no point in translating it: We just don’t say it that way.

For the people of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or the Russian Federation, it has always been exceptionally important who among their fellow citizens was awarded a Nobel Prize and who was not. We look back at 100 years of awards.

Alexei Stakhanov mined 102 tons of coal in under 6 hours, sparking the Stakhanovite movement. But did he really do it all by himself, by his own initiative? The son of a miner from Blagoveshchensk recalls evidence of unnamed assistants and fishy bureaucratic orders.
 

Andrei Platonov spawned many an incongruous image and incomprehensible sentence. Compared by some scholars to James Joyce, he was critiqued by Stalin himself, yet he avoided prosecution. We dig into his challenging literary style.

After just 22 years of independence, in 1940 Estonia was overrun by Soviet troops. The Estonian Socialist Republic was set up in the wake of th Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in violation of nearly all existing legislation. And Stalinism's evils had the Estonians, just a year later, greeting German invaders with open arms. But trading one totalitarian dictator for another didn't solve the problem.
 

Everyone in the Soviet Union knew his songs, despite constant censorship and troubles with the Soviet regime. To this day, any Russian will recognize his raspy singing voice and silly falsetto. But what was the great Vladimir Vysotsky like in person?

July 13 is the anniversary of Isaac Babel's birth. Now celebrated as one of teh great writers of the twentieth century, he had a very difficult time gaining acceptance during his lifetime, and repeatedly suffered from antisemitism, official and otherwise.