A new folk-tale inspired action film beat box office records this winter, despite pandemic restrictions on cinema occupancy levels.
The Last Warrior: Root of Evil, a sequel to the 2017 original, earned one billion rubles ($13.2 million) in just six days after opening on New Year’s Day. The winter holidays are normally a time when the most promising movies must battle it out in cinemas as bored Russians struggle to pass the time (especially thus year, as most were unable to travel).
An added challenge this year was that ticket sales were limited to 25 percent of cinema hall capacity. But The Last Warrior checked all the boxes for a wide range of audiences, from children to adults, thanks to its light genre and elements of fantasy (including a creepy incarnation of Kolobok, the doughy folk character who runs away from his baker, seeking adventure).
In the plot, a modern-day Muscovite (Ivan) finds himself in a medieval fairy tale and decides to stick around after falling in love, only to be forced to fight the evil forces attempting to turn his world upside down. By press time, the film had earned over two billion rubles and had been seen by almost seven million people. A second sequel is already in production.
The Moscow city government has declared war on beavers. The head of city hall’s biodiversity department, Sergei Burmistrov, announced that beavers have taken over some parts of the city, wreaking havoc on trees and flooding low lying areas. The government plans to relocate them.
Pamphlets produced by the environmental department suggest that park visitors must “not panic” but “stand still” during an encounter with a beaver, warning that the animals may bite. (Perhaps they have gotten wind of their coming deportation?)
Beavers regularly colonize the Yauza and Setun rivers, inevitably triggering the ire of city officials. These officials prefer manicured lawns, in pursuit of which they have done more damage to Moscow’s tree canopy than could armies of beavers.
“Это все абсолютно голословные утверждения. Это чистая чушь и компиляция, и ничего другого там нет… Президенту вменяется в собственность то, чего не существует. Вся собственность президента декларируется ежегодно… Мы предупреждаем всех граждан, тем более, с учетом такого большого количества просмотров: подумайте перед тем, как переводить деньги вот таким на самом деле жуликам”
Lighthouse lovers visiting St. Petersburg can now make a side trip to Kronstadt to check out two private museums created by former naval officers (one of the museums opened just this year). The first is the Lighthouse Service Museum, located in Fort Konstantin. It is full of lighthouse components from all over the country, including a giant lens from the 1850s that was found by accident in a village shed. The second is a small museum opened nearby that exhibits models of all the lighthouses in the Bay of Finland.
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For literature lovers, St. Petersburg has opened the long-anticipated “Room-and-a-half” once inhabited by the poet Joseph Brodsky, and where his parents resided until their deaths in the 1980s. The space was purchased in 1999 by art historian Mikhail Milchik and writer Yakov Gordin. They then formed a foundation with the goal of establishing the museum. However, their efforts ran into countless problems, chiefly two decades of conflict with neighbors annoyed at the prospect of a public museum near their homes.
The space was designed by architect Alexander Brodsky (no relation to the poet) and is largely empty. So far, due to outstanding issues with the neighbors, only very small groups can reserve a 90-minute tour of the museum, via the project’s website.
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The Russian Museum will soon open a newly restored wing at Mikhailovsky Castle. The wing was previously closed to the public because it was home to a military library. Several rooms once used by the royal family that were in poor condition and filled with books (later donated to the museum) will be open to visitors after some finishing touches, including the restoration of several massive paintings commissioned by Paul I from painters John Atkinson and Grigory Ugryumov.
Moscow’s famous River Port, in the city’s northwest, will reopen this year after a massive restoration.
The legendary 1930s northern port building is a symbol of so-called “Stalinist” architecture and is shaped like a three-tiered ship. At the time of its opening, the port connected Moscow to several main shipping routes, earning it the moniker “the port of five seas” because of the access it provided to the White, Baltic, Azov, Black and Caspian seas. Like other river ports across the country, however, the building fell into disrepair following the collapse of river transportation and was closed a decade ago because of safety concerns.
The building has been restored exactly as originally envisioned by its architect, Alexei Rukhlyadev, following painstaking archival work. This work was complicated by the fact that the original planning documents were highly classified: the port was built by GULAG prisoners, as were most of the river canals linking Moscow to the seas. The city government has transformed the area surrounding the port into a park and has re-launched river transport in and out of the port.
A cultural center named after film director Andrei Tarkovsky is planned for the village of Myasnoy, near Ryazan. Tarkovsky built a house in the village in the 1970s and spent time there before leaving Russia in 1981.
The house is where Tarkovsky is thought to have written scripts for Stalker, The Mirror, and Solaris, and where he thought he could take refuge and lead a simple farmer’s life if he were not permitted to work. The house is owned by the filmmaker’s son (also named Andrei), who heads up the Tarkovsky Institute and has in the past held cultural events in Myasnoy.
Regional authorities plan for the new cultural center, to be built over the next three years, to host exhibits and concerts.
Russian authorities in Crimea have sold off the legendary Massandra Winery, founded in the late nineteenth century by Prince Lev Golitsyn. The sale has angered Crimeans, who say the winery’s cellars alone are worth several times the price paid.
Massandra has been state-owned since 1936 and was exempt from anti-alcohol legislation during the Gorbachev era. Management of the company changed after the peninsula was annexed by Russia in 2014, but at the time regional authorities promised to keep it under state control. Then, in December, Massandra was sold for R5.3 billion ($70 million) to a subsidiary of Rossiya Bank, an entity subject to Western sanctions that is controlled by allies of President Putin, including Yury Kovalchuk and Gennady Timchenko.
The company is a famous brand, producing 100 different types of wine, particularly sweet varieties like madeira. Yet it also owns over eight thousand hectares of prized land on the Black Sea. Its collection (reportedly some one million bottles) is stored in a network of seven tunnels and nine galleries. It has highly prized items: in 2015, Putin and former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi shared a bottle of 1775 wine, worth tens of thousands of dollars, that Prince Mikhail Vorontsov brought from Spain.
The management explained Massandra’s privatization as driven by financial considerations. Yet while Crimea’s status surely makes it impossible to sell the company’s wine anywhere except Russia, Forbes analyzed the company’s finances and said they were just fine: both profits and sales have been rising.
Many Crimeans saw the sale as a sign of corruption and nepotism. The price is “about 90 percent below than the value of the Massandra collection,” said activist Alexander Talipov, who called the responsible authorities “criminals.” Crimea’s former minister of tourism (when the peninsula was under Ukrainian authority), Alexander Liyev, said the price does not reflect Massandra’s value, and that the sale was not conducted transparently.
«Решение американских интернет-платформ о блокировке главы государства можно сравнить с ядерным взрывом в киберсреде: не столь страшны разрушения, сколь последствия»
“The decision by American internet platforms to block a head of state can be compared to a nuclear blast in cyberspace: it’s not the damage that’s frightening so much as the consequences.”
Moscow is opening a new museum of twentieth-century literature. After delays due to the pandemic, its opening has been set for March, and its first exhibit will be on Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam.
It will be located in the building of the State Literature Museum on Zubovsky Boulevard and is expected to be a multimedia-style museum, different from the Soviet-style “house museums” typical of literary museums throughout Russia.
The Michelin Guide and its stars will be shining on Moscow this year: the iconic restaurant guide is publishing its first guide to Russian restaurants this year, calling the capital a “culinary gem” where talented chefs are inventing new trends, earning spots in global rankings, and attracting foodies from around the world.
The capital’s chefs have been delighted at the attention, particularly after pandemic-related closures left many businesses struggling. Michelin is notoriously picky, and when it gives a restaurant even one star, this mark of quality is then verified regularly by the organization’s inspectors.
For years now, Russian cuisine has been thriving and many restaurants have succeeded by emphasizing regional delicacies and fresh takes on old dishes. And the trend has not been limited to the two capitals, making traveling the country more enjoyable than ever.
Sergei Shubenkov, one of the world’s top hurdlers and a prominent Russian athlete competing as an ANA (Authorized Neutral Athlete) in the wake of recent doping scandals, has been accused of doping.
Several Russian sports media outlets reported that one of the Shubenkov’s test samples contain a banned diuretic, furosemide. Shubenkov vehemently denied taking banned substances and said the reports are an attempt to discredit him.
“I’ve never lied to anyone during my career and have given my opinion about doping liars on many occasions,” he said on Instagram. The Athletics Integrity Unit, a disciplinary body of World Athletics, denied that Shubenkov is on a list of banned athletes. Along with Maria Lasitskene and Anzhelika Sidorova, Shubenkov has been an outspoken critic of Russian athletics authorities, who many feel are not doing enough to restore the country’s eligibility for international competition.
«Это просто компиляция. Монтаж. Выражаясь языком одного известного персонажа, хочется сказать: «Скучно, девочки»… Есть люди, которых я вообще не знаю, которые там упоминаются. Вообще просто никогда их не видел в глаза. Не знаком с ними»
VASILY LANOVOY, a stage and film actor best known for playing heartthrobs in Soviet cinema, passed away at the age of 87, after a battle with the coronavirus.
Best known for his roles in Tolstoy’s dramas War and Peace and Anna Karenina, where he played the charismatic womanizers Anatol Kuragin and Alexei Vronsky, respectively, Lanovoy was from a working-class family and rocketed to fame shortly after finishing his acting studies.
He portrayed Pavka Korchagin in the eponymous revolutionary drama based on the novel How the Steel Was Tempered. Critics said his good looks actually prevented him from being cast in more interesting roles, and it was on the theater stage that he was able to truly use his talent. He was a veteran of Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theater and continued working until he fell ill in December.
Irina Antonova, a force of nature in the arts world, who spent five decades at the helm of the Pushkin Museum, passed away at 98.
Perhaps Russia’s best-known curator and art historian, Antonova had worked at the Pushkin since 1945 and was instrumental in tenaciously promoting European art in the Soviet Union – an often-risky endeavor at odds with official ideology.
Thanks to Antonova, Soviet art lovers had a chance to see the Mona Lisa, French impressionists, Picasso, Modigliani, as well as Russia’s own Malevich and Kandinsky. A legend in the arts world, she negotiated with both European museums and Soviet bureaucrats. Under her leadership, the Pushkin Museum became a venerable institution, growing to encompass a wide cluster of arts institutions, including new depositaries, auditoriums, and even a forthcoming concert hall.
Born in 1922, Antonova lived in Germany with her parents for several years, but they left in 1933 after the Nazis came to power. She studied art history in Moscow and worked as a nurse during the war. When she stepped down into an honorary post of museum president in 2013, she was the longest-serving museum director in the world. And, even after stepping down, she still came to the museum daily and remained involved in its projects.
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