January 01, 2019

Four Million Words


Four Million Words

We have had a website since 1993. It began as an ecommerce site, to sell all our books and maps. (For the record, Amazon did not get started until 1994. Just sayin'.)

When we took over Russian Life magazine in 1995, the site added information about issue contents, online-only articles, and of course we also sold subscriptions online.

There have been several redesigns, reboots, and enhancements over the years, and databases have always been an important part of the Russian Life website (to make it more dynamic and useful) – from a catalog of all our magazine's articles, to historical dates, to companies, to schools where Russian is being taught.

Views of Websites Past

 

Last July we decided to kick things up several notches. Our New Russian Life crowdfunding campaign raised funds to (1) rationalize and unify all of our databases and digital content, and (2) put all of the back issue content of Russian Life online – saving it for posterity, while making it accessible to readers and researchers anywhere in the world.

We have been thinking for many years about how we would do all this, what tools we would use, and how it would all look. Executing on those ideas over the past six months has been a huge undertaking (and we're not done yet). Nothing we have done with our website over the previous 25 years can even begin to compare. A huge shout out goes to our web engineer and full stack developer Scott Widmer. He has helped make this process smooth and rational.

The website is built on the very powerful, open-source CMS system called Mura. We have been using Mura for over a decade to manage the website, but never have we used it to its full potential until now. Mura will allow us to scale the site up immeasurably, to manage and edit articles from contributors from all over the world, and to have it all perform at high speed and efficiency. Together with a Slatwall ecommerce solution, it will also allow us to sell online subscriptions, manage print subscriptions, and unify our content-focused website with our commerce-focused website for the first time into one seamless whole.

When complete, the online archive of 24 years of Russian Life will include over 8,000 articles, and over 4,000,000 words, all indexed and searchable.

And it will only grow from there!

Thank you to all our readers, supporters, backers and partners in this upgrade. We encourage you to bookmark and return to the site weekly. Our audacious goal is to make russianlife.com the most useful, influential online resource for Russophiles the world over. And we can only do that with your help.

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Some of Our Books

Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

A book that dares to explore the humanity of priests and pilgrims, saints and sinners, Faith & Humor has been both a runaway bestseller in Russia and the focus of heated controversy – as often happens when a thoughtful writer takes on sacred cows. The stories, aphorisms, anecdotes, dialogues and adventures in this volume comprise an encyclopedia of modern Russian Orthodoxy, and thereby of Russian life.
Fearful Majesty

Fearful Majesty

This acclaimed biography of one of Russia’s most important and tyrannical rulers is not only a rich, readable biography, it is also surprisingly timely, revealing how many of the issues Russia faces today have their roots in Ivan’s reign.
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas

The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas

This exciting new trilogy by a Russian author – who has been compared to Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco – vividly recreates a lost world, yet its passions and characters are entirely relevant to the present day. Full of mystery, memorable characters, and non-stop adventure, The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas is a must read for lovers of historical fiction and international thrillers.  
Maria's War: A Soldier's Autobiography

Maria's War: A Soldier's Autobiography

This astonishingly gripping autobiography by the founder of the Russian Women’s Death Battallion in World War I is an eye-opening documentary of life before, during and after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

In this comprehensive, quixotic and addictive book, Edwin Trommelen explores all facets of the Russian obsession with vodka. Peering chiefly through the lenses of history and literature, Trommelen offers up an appropriately complex, rich and bittersweet portrait, based on great respect for Russian culture.
The Moscow Eccentric

The Moscow Eccentric

Advance reviewers are calling this new translation "a coup" and "a remarkable achievement." This rediscovered gem of a novel by one of Russia's finest writers explores some of the thorniest issues of the early twentieth century.
Tolstoy Bilingual

Tolstoy Bilingual

This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious. 
Bears in the Caviar

Bears in the Caviar

Bears in the Caviar is a hilarious and insightful memoir by a diplomat who was “present at the creation” of US-Soviet relations. Charles Thayer headed off to Russia in 1933, calculating that if he could just learn Russian and be on the spot when the US and USSR established relations, he could make himself indispensable and start a career in the foreign service. Remarkably, he pulled it of.
Murder at the Dacha

Murder at the Dacha

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin has a problem. Several, actually. Not the least of them is the fact that a powerful Soviet boss has been murdered, and Matyushkin's surly commander has given him an unreasonably short time frame to close the case.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

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Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955