The Russian State Children’s Library is digitizing and uploading to the internet some 16,000 Soviet filmstrips, or diafilmy, ubiquitous here through the 1990s. The filmstrips – essentially stills on 35mm film with captions, similar to a comic strip – were made for home projectors or handheld film viewers. Diafilm was also the name of the Soviet studio founded in 1930 to make the coveted film rolls packaged in colorful round boxes.
Several hundred such “films,” some educational and others based on literary works, are available on the library’s website: bit.ly/diafilms
The Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom, which was created by his daughter Zhanna and is based in Germany, has launched an award, the Boris Nemtsov Prize for Supporting Democratic Values in Russia. Public and cultural figures, as well as journalists, can qualify for the $10,000 annual prize to be handed out on June 12 (Russia Day).
The foundation, whose advisory board includes figures such as former US Ambassador Michael McFaul and the formerly imprisoned, now exiled, businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, also has goals in the education sphere and says it seeks to launch a program for educating Russian students in Europe.
Award-winning director Alexei German, Jr. is filming the first biopic of Soviet and émigré writer Sergei Dovlatov, whose reputation is enjoying a renaissance of sorts in Russia, including state-supported festivals in his honor. The film will be shot by Lukasz Zal, whose work on the Polish film Ida won an Oscar, and the protagonist will be played by a non-Russian actor (reportedly, a Serbian), according to the film’s producer.
The team is filming in St. Petersburg, where they often must ask residents to put period objects on their balconies or endure traffic jams when streets are blocked off in order to recreate a twentieth-century Leningrad. The plot is reportedly focused on four days in Dovlatov’s life prior to his departure to Tallinn.
Specialists from St. Petersburg’s Foundation to Save the Baltic Seals have had a busy spring. As ice in the Gulf of Finland breaks up – usually in April – they wait for baby seals to be washed up on Baltic shores, stranded along the populated coasts of Leningrad Oblast and St. Petersburg.
Created in 2013, the foundation now works with the city’s water utilities company to save the rare Baltic Ringed Seal, less than 200 of which remain in the Gulf of Finland. Already in 2016, a baby seal weighing just four kilograms was rescued by a fisherman. The foundation treats and feeds the animals until they are strong enough to survive on their own, then releases them into the wild. balticseal.org
Theoretically, according to one estimate, Russia has 29 billion tons of extractable oil that it can tap. That is enough to last for 57 years. Yet only 14 billion of those tons are “proven resources,” enough to last just 28 years. Natural Resources and Environment Minister Sergei Donskoy has said that, if Russia does not discover significant new fields, oil extraction will begin to decline starting in 2020.
Veteran head of the Russian State Archives, Sergei Mironenko, has quit amid speculation that he was forcibly demoted due to differences of opinion with the country’s culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky.
Mironenko, a historian who has held his job since the Archives’ post-Soviet inception, was not widely known until he publicly renounced an important Soviet-era myth about the Panfilov Division’s famous 28 Guardsmen. According to the myth, 28 soldiers heroically sacrificed their lives in 1941 to protect Moscow from German tanks, of which they blew up 18. The story was immensely important to Soviet authorities, and memorials constructed to honor the 28 heroes dot the country.
The only problem, Mironenko said, is that the story was fabricated by frontline journalists working for the Red Star newspaper. The archive published documents refuting the myth in 2015.
Culture Minister Medinsky, who also heads the Russian Military History Society – an entity that influences exhibitions, movies, and other cultural touchstones – was furious, calling Mironenko “unethical” and recommending that archivists reserve judgment, since they are “not writers, journalists, or fighters of falsifications.”
The 65-year-old Mironenko said in an interview that he left his post after meeting Medinsky one on one, taking a lower position in the organization. Though the official reason for his departure is his age, few doubt that the real reason was ideological disagreements about truth and propaganda.
Evgenia Medvedeva, a 16-year-old debutante at this year’s World Figure Skating Championships, not only swiftly climbed to the top of the podium, but also broke the world record for highest score in the ladies’ free skate program. Her performance, packed with incredibly difficult elements, earned her a score of 150.10 points.
One of Russia’s growing roster of teenage figure skating aces, Medvedeva is coached by Eteri Tutberidze, who also trained Yulia Lipnitskaya, whose dizzying spins earned her Olympic gold in Sochi. Medvedeva, who also won the Euro Championships earlier this year, was praised by commentators for her fluid and cool-headed skating.
Russian journalists have had enough: after one too many attacks – this time by armed Chechens who beat up several reporters and torched their minibus in Ingushetiya – they are creating a new independent trade union to fight for the rights of media workers.
Launched by Zona Media, a website focused on human rights and criminal cases, the union will hold its first congress in June to decide how the organization will be run and to register it with authorities. Independent journalists have long argued that the existing organization, the Journalists Union, does nothing to lobby for their rights and safety, including in cases of intimidation or physical attacks. In its first week, over 100 journalists joined the new union. znak.com
After the embarrassing disqualification of Russia’s track and field team from competition last year, another doping scandal has hit some of its biggest sports stars: meldonium. The heart medication, sold under the trade name Mildronate, produced in Latvia, and widespread in former Soviet countries, has long been lauded in sports circles for boosting endurance and hastening recovery, though its side-effects have not been closely examined and it is not sold in most Western countries.
In January, meldonium joined the list of internationally banned substances for athletes, and, though most Russian sports federations warned their athletes about the prohibition, many apparently did not get the memo, including tennis star Maria Sharapova, who recently announced she had failed doping tests.
The drug was also discovered in the systems of gymnast Nikolai Kuksenkov, swimmer Yulia Efimova, speed skater Pavel Kulizhnikov, and dozens of others, putting many athletes in jeopardy. It is not clear whether they ignored warnings, never received them, or if meldonium simply stays in the body long after an athlete stops taking it.
Aspiring lawmakers running for seats in this year’s Duma elections will have to watch their Ps and Qs. The sitting Duma has ruled that, going forward, it will be illegal to use the faces of famous people, including Vladimir Putin, in campaign ads.
“Not one candidate can hide behind a pretty photo of the president, governor, or another celebrity,” said Igor Lebedev, the deputy who authored the bill.
Alexander Esenin-Volpin, a veteran of the human rights movement, mathematician, poet, and son of the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, passed away in March at the age of 91. In and out of Stalin’s penal camps from an early age, Esenin-Volpin was able to return to Moscow after Stalin’s death, where he worked as a mathematician. In 1965 he organized the so-called Glasnost Meeting, the first post-War protest in the USSR, which demanded a fair trial for the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel (see Russian Life, Mar/Apr 2016).
Esenin-Volpin eventually became known for formulaically and systematically protesting violations of rights codified in the Soviet Constitution. He eventually succumbed to pressure from authorities and emigrated to the United States in 1972, where he became a professor at Boston University.
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