A Croatian critic ripped Putin for the photo below, saying: "With the gesture of an experienced porn star, fixing the observer with his chill gaze, Putin is sending an indirect kiss to the gay population: the long, slippery sturgeon in his hands could be a penis, and Putin is

If there is an iconic image of Russian imperial power and looking westward toward Europe, it is this enormous statue of Peter the Great, funded by his successor Catherine the Great, in Saint Petersburg. Known as The Bronze Horseman, it famously was celebrated in a hallucinatory Pushkin poem of 1833

Valery Bryusov's The Fiery Angel (Russian: Огненный ангел, translated as Ognenny angel) was published as a serial through 1907 and 1908. What made it interesting for readers was the love triangle it told between three prominent Russian Symbolist writers: Bryusov himself, Nina Petrovskaya and Andrei Bely. The Symbolists

President Putin was walking in the Kremlin grounds on June 28, 2006, when he stopped to chat with some tourists, among them a five year old boy. Channel One state television showed Putin kneeling down and asking his name. The boy replied, "Nikita." Putin lifted the boy'

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century and still so few people know about it. Maybe the Russian movie of 2024 will help reverse that, if it ever gets released here. It was a box office hit in Russia in

Where does White play on a Red and Black chessboard? At the moment it doesn't. White Russians go into exile in the West. (Blue doesn't either; blue was the color of the Romanovs.) Andrei Tarkovsky directed one of my favorite films, the leisurely 1966 masterpiece Andrei

Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring: Pictures from Pagan Russia Stravinsky's ballet is for cynics. It was designed to shock and awe when it debuted in Paris in 1913 and sure enough there was a riot. Diaghilev was delighted. The ballet itself was premised on a vision

Arguably the most popular ballet in the world and one that changed people's lives (Diaghilev, Anna Pavlova to name two). Tchaikovsky's second ballet premiered in St. Petersburg in 1890 and he saw more success with it than with Swan Lake or The Nutcracker. Sexual metaphors aside

This is a White Army propaganda poster of Trotsky from around 1919 - both anti-Semitic and racist - the basic idea being to warn patriotic Russians that the Soviets were under the control of Jews and Chinese foreigners.

Did you start here? Because the optimist picks this fairytale... Above is Vasnetsov's The Flying Carpet (1880), showing Ivan Tsarevich (Prince Ivan) returning on a magic carpet with the Firebird in a cage. Strangely very few Russian fairytales have made their way into the European consciousness the way

The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with Polonium-210 in London on November 1, 2006. He was dead three weeks later at the age of 43. Litvinenko blamed President Vladimir Putin for the poison in a statement released after his death. A spokesman for Putin declared that the

In The Master and Margarita, the heroine and her maid Natasha become witches. And why not? By and large Russian painters have not tackled witches very often, although Russian folklore produced one of the most fearsome of them all, Baba Yaga. The most famous painting of her is by Ivan

The strangely dressed older man with the Muslim skullcap was a foreigner for sure. The younger man just looked worried. Perhaps they had money. Who knows these days? Especially since they were speaking in Russian. The waiter helped the two men seat themselves in the hotel restaurant then hovered. "