Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: New Art from...
‘Deeply personal and inventive’: Gosha Ostretsov’s Criminal Government (2008). Photograph: courtesy of the Saatchi gallery There is a staggering photograph at the Saatchi gallery of a Russian criminal...
View ArticleLong wait for Putin's 'residential renaissance'
MOSCOW — In Russia, as in many other countries, one main measure of living conditions is the number of "squares"— square meters — in a flat. For example, "normal" for a modern middle-class nuclear...
View ArticleYan Lianke satirizes contemporary China
In 2010, before I visited my late father's native village in China's central province of Henan, a friend recommended that I read Yan Lianke's books to prepare for my trip. Yan, one of China's eminent...
View ArticleHammer and tickle: The dark humour of Soviet art
What is the story of art in Russia in the dying decades of the great communist experiment? And what has happened since? Two new shows at the Saatchi Gallery aim to give some comprehensive answers. The...
View ArticleImperiled by power ‘Former People’ charts the desperate struggle for...
“Former People” by Douglas Smith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pages, $30) The sudden disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989 opened many of its locked and shuttered government archives, libraries...
View ArticleAs Moscow’s Jewish museum opens, a family tells 100-year tale of hardship to...
MOSCOW — In czarist times, Geda Zimanenko watched her mother offer the local police officer a shot of vodka on a plate and five rubles every Sunday to overlook the fact that their family lived outside...
View Article50 years since Solzhenitsyn Gulag story shocked USSR
MOSCOW — The Soviet Union 50 years ago allowed publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s landmark account of life in the Stalin prison camps One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, shocking readers by...
View ArticleFreed scientist finds little change or hope in Russia
KRASNOYARSK, Russia (Reuters) - Grey, pale and thin, Valentin Danilov has changed more than the country that jailed him in 2004 for selling state secrets to China. The 66-year-old Russian physicist,...
View ArticleWhy a military coup is impossible in Russia (Comment)
Tweet Two senior officers are currently on trial in Russia for attempting to organise coups, but few believe a military?led uprising could succeed in the country in the foreseeable future. "There are...
View ArticleWhy a Military Coup is Impossible in Russia
MOSCOW, November 22 (Alexandra Odynova, RIA Novosti) - Two Russian senior military officers are currently on trial for attempting to organize military coups in Russia, but few believe a military-led...
View ArticleIntolerant Dreams: The Rise & Rebirth of Soviet Sci-Fi
MOSCOW, November 27 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – Back in 1985, Sting surmised that the Russians loved their children no less than the Americans. But what the song did not mention was that the...
View ArticleAs Moscow's Jewish museum opens, a family tells 100-year tale of hardship to...
MOSCOW - In czarist times, Geda Zimanenko watched her mother offer the local police officer a shot of vodka on a plate and five rubles every Sunday to overlook the fact that their family lived outside...
View Article>Museum at heart of Russia's Jewish culture revival
MOSCOW (AP) — In czarist times, Geda Zimanenko watched her mother offer the local police officer a shot of vodka on a plate and five rubles every Sunday to overlook the fact that their family lived...
View ArticleMuseum at heart of Russia's Jewish culture revival
In czarist times, Geda Zimanenko watched her mother offer the local police officer a shot of vodka on a plate and five rubles every Sunday to overlook the fact that their family lived outside the area...
View ArticleSolzhenitsyn's One Day: The book that shook the USSR
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic novel, was published 50 years ago this month. A short, simply-told tale about a prisoner trying to survive the Gulag - the...
View ArticleA View from Livadia Palace
I drove up to white and sumptuous Livadia Palace with some difficulty. The palace, once a royal summer residence built and frequented by the last Russian Tsar, stands on a rather steep slope amidst a...
View ArticleR.I.P. Soviet surrealism
Memento Park, on the edge of Budapest, is surrounded by wild lilac bushes that fill their air with perfume on this spring day. Lenin is the first of the communist-hero statues that I meet, and he is...
View ArticleThe Obama mandate means the government plans to grab more of your money
“…we are reducing taxes on production, investing money in the economy. We are optimizing state expenses. The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the...
View ArticleSocialism may be waning, but not for young Russians
Photo Gallery: MOSCOW — Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ideas of Marx and Lenin are making a comeback in Russia with a wave of young leftists whose potential for mass appeal...
View ArticleAPNewsBreak: FBI releases Stalin's daughter files
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Newly declassified documents show the FBI kept close tabs on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's only daughter after her high profile defection to the United States in 1967, gathering...
View Article
