Category: Architecture

They did their best to keep spirits up by doing what they did before it happened, by writing music, singing, and dancing. By parodying their circumstances in lighthearted tunes, they could perhaps forget for a moment the death all around them. They were the prisoners in Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, who organized…

Caroline Eden has made a name for herself by exploring roads less traveled, such as the Black Sea littoral, the subject of her eponymous previous book. In “Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia, from Hinterland to Heartland,” she trains her considerable skills as a keen observer and evocative writer on the Central Asian…

The traditional format of the international book fair Non/Fiction was postponed until next spring due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But to keep the reading public happy, the organizers are moving their meetings with famous authors online this and next weekend. On Dec. 5,6, 12 and 13 anyone can tune in to hear discussions with such…

A young Russian artist has won the illustration contest for J.K. Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter children’s book, “The Ickabog.” Artwork by Yevdokiya “Dunya” Obolenskaya, 11, is among 34 original illustrations chosen out of 42,000 submissions from around the world for Rowling’s latest book published earlier in November. “Mama had received a text message close to…

The State Hermitage Museum’s art collection might be one of the most impressive in the world — but for some sightseers, it’s the museum’s resident cats who make the visit truly memorable. Memorable enough, even, to include them in one’s will. The cats made such an impression on French citizen Christoff Botar that he chose…

The Kinoproba international festival-workshop for film-school students opened its doors in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg on Tuesday. The annual fest, which has hosted works from the world’s best film schools since 2004, was kicked off by an eye-catchiing short animated film called “Dance A Trois.” The film shows constructivist landmark buildings in Yekaterinburg coming to life and…

HOLLYWOOD—Russian-made films led the pack with three entries in the 78th annual Golden Globes competition. Qualifying motion pictures include director Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Dear Comrades,” Klim Shipenko’s “Text” and Yegor Abramenko’s “Sputnik.”  Russia is also represented as a co-producer in two other films: Ivan Tverdovsky’s “Conference” (Russia, Estonia, United Kingdom and Italy); and director Vadim Perelman’s…

The team behind Moscow’s annual feminist festival has launched a male equivalent to field discussions on modern-day masculinity, reverse sexism and other issues men face today. Gender.Team, a group of activists, psychologists, political scientists and journalists, established the Moscow FemFest in 2017 to promote gender literacy in a society not used to openly talking about…

As one virus sweeps the globe, the Voznesensky Center in Moscow has joined with several arts and non-governmental organizations to launch a nearly month-long series events to mark a battle against another virus, HIV. The project, called “Of the Same Blood,” will start on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day, and run until Dec. 22. More…

Irina Antonova, longtime head of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and renowned expert in Renaissance art, has died at the age of 98, the museum’s press service said in a statement on Tuesday. She died from complications caused by the coronavirus. Antonova was born in Moscow in 1922. As a child, she spent…

Despite the coronavirus restrictions in place, Moscow residents will still be able to enjoy some of their favorite winter outdoor activities like ice skating this year. Despite a lack of steady snow, the capital’s outdoor ice rinks opened to the public over the weekend — with some changes in place to help prevent the spread…

Cyclone Sara blew through Russia this week, bringing with her the first serious snowfall of the season.  This is always cause for Russians to celebrate, jubilantly greeting one another, “to the first snow!”  nd there is something undeniably magical about watching the first snow of the season sift itself over the darkling world like a…

This fall the Museum of Russian Impressionism opened an exhibition called “Sergei Vinogradov: A Painted Life,” about a brilliant artist who worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and yet is almost unknown today. The exhibition is a voyage of discovery, introducing  the public to works by a painter of the same caliber…

Cyclone Sara arrived in Russia from northern Europe late on Sunday, bringing the much-awaited first substantive snows of the season to Moscow. Muscovites streamed outside to enjoy the winter wonderland while they still can — because it’s already expected to disappear when warmer weather arrives later this week. Here’s a closer look at the magic…

A man dressed in all black mimes scrambled Brodsky verses while a cellist rakes her instrument with plastic wedges…thundering drum beats are inspired by the latest protests in Belarus… musicians in virtual reality goggles clatter on mechanical typewriters. These are just some of the images and sounds that the audience at “Russian Music 2.0” was…

During my years in Moscow, I’ve experienced every kind of Thanksgiving from an ostentatious luncheon for 30 in the late 1990s at a palatial flat in the House on the Embankment to the nadir of the bleak, almost Dickensian Thursday night, when my daughter and I sat down to a plate of chicken nuggets and…

Muscovites are bracing for an unconventional holiday season after the cancellation of the city’s annual Christmas and New Year’s festivities, the closure of late-night entertainment and new restrictions on cinemas and theaters. Despite the restrictions, Moscow is already putting up extravagant lighting displays across the city, inviting residents to enjoy a festive stroll through the…

As a descendant of revered literary genius Leo Tolstoy, Ilya Tolstoy spent much of his childhood at the writer’s countryside estate in Yasnaya Polyana south of Moscow. After years of working as a producer at several state-run news channels, Ilya, 33, grew tired of the breakneck pace of life in Russia’s capital and yearned for…

Western audiences are in raptures over the series. Its rating on the authoritative IMDb website stands at 8.8 of 10 based on more than 100,000 responses. But in Russia, it elicits a mix of emotions — even though it portrays Russian chess masters as undeniable geniuses. It seems that the series has touched some deep…

Designer Philip Treacy, a haute couture hatmaker to the British royals and American stars, presented his collection in St. Petersburg on Wednesday saying “we all need entertainment” during a pandemic. The 53-year-old Irishman, who counts among his clients Queen Elizabeth II, the Duchess of Cambridge and Madonna, unveiled the collection at St. Petersburg’s Erarta Museum…

Maria Plotkina and Arina Nuriahmetova were stressed young computer science teachers battling an entrenched system of learning when they decided to set up Geek Teachers to equip school teachers across Russia with the IT skills to bring the latest education technologies to the classroom. Four years later, their platform, which has over 13,000 online followers,…

Has this ever happened to you?  You see something unusual at the market—you may have no clue what it is — but you pounce on it anyway, only to get it home and wonder, “now what?” These are the inciting incidents of my culinary life in Russia. I fill my pantry with oddities that intrigue…

Soviet rock icon Viktor Tsoi’s legacy has experienced a renaissance in 2020, with his band Kino’s Perestroika-era song “Khochu Peremen!” (I Want Changes!) becoming an anthem of the mass opposition protests in Belarus. But don’t expect the charismatic Kino frontman to appear onscreen in a new biopic that opened in theaters across Russia on Thursday.…

Netflix is launching a pilot project that will provide films dubbed into Russian, Interfax has reported.   The new service, in partnership with Russian media holding company National Media Group (NMG), will offer more Russian content including the series “To The Lake,” which Netflix is showing on worldwide platforms. Although Netflix has been available in Russia…

A bombshell exploded in the Russian media recently: Stephen King praised a Russian TV series that was based on a Russian book no less, and that Netflix had picked up for the largest sum ever paid for a Russian series. I’m certain that King himself has no idea of the sensation he caused. He was…

It has been a dog of a week! First: the American election. Next: appliances then went on what was clearly a coordinated sympathy strike: the stand mixture, the icemaker, and the stove’s pilot light all stopped working. And then my dog got sick. The vets sent us home with medication and instructions to keep our…

Beloved Soviet-era satirist Mikhail Zhvanetsky has died from an unknown cause at age 86, Russian media reported Friday. “I can only confirm that he has died,” Zhvanetsky’s spokesman Oleg Stashkevich told the state-run TASS news agency without disclosing the cause of death.  Born in the Soviet Ukrainian city of Odessa on March 6, 1934, Zhvanetsky…

On Wednesday, Russians celebrated the country’s newest holiday, National Unity Day. Originally established to commemorate Moscow’s liberation from the Polish-Lithuanian occupation in 1612, it now also aims to promote ethnic and religious tolerance among the country’s diverse population. Though 15 years have passed since Nov. 4 was first marked as a public holiday, the date…

Можно? How do you approach a stranger on the streets? How do you ask to take a photograph without speaking the language? What seem to be barriers at first make it easier in the end. You just ask. It’s easier to speak a few words, but it works just as well without. You show the…

For millions of people around the world who dabble in the occult, Halloween is one of the most important — and fun — holidays of the year. But while younger Russians might wear costumes and go to Halloween parties today, it’s not a traditional or widespread holiday for much of the country. Despite the lack…

Halloween as we think of it — jack-o’-lanterns, children dressed up trick-or-treating, scary decor —  is a relatively recent import to Russia. Apart from the expatriate enclaves where they take trick-or-treating very seriously indeed, the holiday has found its most fertile soil in the grown-up playgrounds of nightclubs and bars. And this makes sense, since…

Our friends and neighbors at the Hyatt Regency Petrovsky Park have brought back the gastronomic stay-at-home travel experiences that kept many of us happy and well-fed during the spring lockdown. Now they’ve doubled their culinary geography. Instead of one, now there are two sets of delicious food available for order every weekend. The new offerings,…

On Thursday evening Pushkin House announced that Sergei Medvedev is this year’s winner of the 2020 Pushkin House Book Prize for his collection of essays called in English “The Return of the Russian Leviathan.”  The book was translated by Stephen Dalziel. The prize, which carries a monetary award of £10,000, is given every year for…

A former German language professor, Olga Shirnina is best known worldwide by her online alias, klimbim, with which she signs her unique artwork. Shirnina colors historical photographs using Photoshop, offering a new take on history and the figures that shaped her world. Behind this seemingly straightforward coloring exercise are hours of meticulous research — after…

Like virtually every other international symposium, congress or conference this year, the 10th Anniversary Symposium of Traditional Polyphony that was to be held in Tibilisi, Georgia, could not welcome singers in person. So the Yale Russian Chorus gave up their travel plans but joined with their Alumni Association and the Kartuli Ensemble to sing for…

Filmmaker Roman Liberov, renowned for his whimsical and moving literary-cinematic works, is releasing a new film on November 5. “The Innermost Man” is inspired by the life and prose of Andrei Platonov, one of Russia’s most paradoxical writers. It is a captivating new addition to Liberov’s series about 20th century Russian writers, who each found…

Filmmaker Roma Liberov, renowned for his whimsical and moving literary-cinematic works, is releasing a new film on November 5. “The Innermost Man” is inspired by the life and prose of Andrei Platonov, one of Russia’s most paradoxical writers. It is a captivating new addition to Liberov’s series about 20th century Russian writers, who each found…

With the baby carriage I can go to the store but not to the pharmacy, because there is no ramp. That was part of my daily planning when I became a mother. Life with a baby carriage was sometimes complicated, but the lives of many disabled people, especially in smaller Russian cities and towns, often shrinks…

Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, one of Moscow’s oldest and largest venues for contemporary art, has joined with the VII Moscow International Biennale for Young Art to hold a series of educational programs. The public online discussions, online “diaries,” and master classes have just begun and will run until early December. The discussions are on…

Mushroom season continues its stately autumnal progress.  Having stocked the freezer with mushroom soup, mushroom lasagna, and mushroom pâté, I suddenly remembered that most quintessentially mushroom-y dish of them all; one  I’m guessing none of us has enjoyed in quite some time: Mushroom Julien.  This fixture of glitzy Soviet-era restaurants and theater buffets is another…

HOLLYWOOD—The historic 1986 Reykjavik summit between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan will be the backdrop for a new satirical film. The working title of the movie is “Tear Down This Wall,” Reagan’s famous entreaty to Gorbachev. Based on the book “An Impossible Dream: Reagan, Gorbachev and a World Without the Bomb”…

The Engineering Building of the Tretyakov Gallery is hosting an exhibition that is a must-see for anyone interested in early 20th-century Soviet art. It is a show of works by Sarra Lebedeva, one of the ‘Amazons of the Avant-Garde’ that included the better known Vera Mukhina, Anna Golubkina, and Yekaterina Belashova. The exhibition is the…

Wednesday, Oct. 21 marked 10 years since Sergei Sobyanin was first voted into office by the Moscow City Duma. Born in a remote Siberian village, Sobyanin rose through the ranks to the highest echelons of the Russian political elite throughout his career. His mayorship of Moscow has been marked by a number of ambitious projects,…

The St. Petersburg exhibition “Consciousness Without Borders” showcases the work of two young contemporary artists, Yulia Virko and Anthony Gelfand. This show is an expanded version of a previous joint show held at Center for Contemporary Art Winzavod in Moscow earlier this autumn. Both Virko and Gelfand create their own realities based on what they…

Independent journalism isn’t dead. You can help keep it alive. The Moscow Times’ team of journalists has been first with the big stories on the coronavirus crisis in Russia since day one. Our exclusives and on-the-ground reporting are being read and shared by many high-profile journalists. We wouldn’t be able to produce this crucial journalism…

Sunday marked three weeks since the start of the latest escalation in fighting between longtime foes Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. A Moscow-brokered ceasefire has proven to be unreliable as military and civilian casualties continue to rise on both sides. Over the weekend, members of the Armenian and Azerbaijani diasporas in…

HOLLYWOOD—Former FBI director James Comey was in the news continuously for nearly four years. In 2018 he wrote a book about his experiences, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership” that focused, in part, on his last tumultuous months before and after the 2016 election. In late September his story was told in a new…

Ilbrus, 59 years old I was born in Azerbaijan and I studied in Baku. During the Soviet period I went to study in Nizhny Novgorod at the Institute of Water Transportation. And I’ve lived here since then. Today I am driving a taxi, but in the 1990s and 2000s, I had my own business and…

I love soup season, and where I live, this lasts about nine months of the year.  As you may imagine, borshch is in heavy rotation in our household, but as I’ve written before, no two pots of borshch are ever the same. There is no hard and fast recipe for borshch; it varies depending on…

In the era of Covid-19 Kinotavr, aka the Open Russian Film Festival, was postponed from June until September. It took place at the Black Sea resort of Sochi, and despite social distancing and other precautions, several directors, actors and film critics still got infected with the coronavirus. It’s just as well that we are watching…

Soviet film lovers rejoice! None other than the iconic Cheburashka will return to the big screen in 2022. Produced by the famous Soyuzmultfilm, the new movie will be a collaboration between Russian independent studio YBA and Disney, with production set to begin in 2021. Cheburashka made his on-screen debut in a 1969 film by Soviet…

As a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic hits Russia, Moscow is once again eyeing new restrictions to prevent the virus’ spread among the city’s 12.7 million people. As of Tuesday, Moscow has confirmed 339,431 cases of Covid-19, with 264,500 patients recovered. Here’s a look at life in Russia’s capital amid the second wave:

Yekaterinburg Pregnant woman, 37 years old Today is my last day of freedom; I have a C-section appointment for tomorrow. And that’s it. I will have to breastfeed a baby, no more breakfasts at a café for me. (Editor’s Note: Mesto47 team met the woman in a coffee shop) I can’t say that I dislike children, it’s…

Each year, the panel of judges of Pushkin House’s annual Book Prize considers 80-100 non-fiction books about Russia published in the previous year. Their daunting task is to choose from this list just six finalists for the Pushkin House’s coveted Book Prize, which will be awarded for the eighth year this autumn. This year’s shortlisted…

Ivan Bunin was the first Russian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Born on Oct. 22, 1870 [Oct. 10 O.S.] in a noble family in Voronezh, he studied at the Yelets men’s gymnasium in the Lipetsk region but left before finishing. He lived in Yefremov, Oryol, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and many other…

It takes just four hours to get to St. Petersburg from Moscow by high-speed train, a couple more hours by car, but what about 16 days by bike? Twelve volunteers, mainly Muscovites, finished their 1,100-kilometer expedition at the Hermitage museum last Sunday. This trip wasn’t the first one in Russia’s cycling movement, but has a…

More than 200 runners and their four-legged friends put their best feet — and paws — forward this weekend for the Fast Dog Cross Country charity run in Moscow’s Bitsevsky Forest Park. The annual race raises money to help support animal shelter and rescue efforts. Take a look at the fast-paced race in action:

Dima, Yekaterinburg I grew up in Yekaterinburg, I’m transgender. It all started because I thought I liked to dress like a boy. Then I started thinking about it more, and at first I decided that I was agender, something in the middle of both sexes. Then, about a year ago, I realized that I wasn’t…

The time has come to speak about Russia’s true national sport. Forget football, disregard hockey, and abandon judo; the season of “tikhaya okhota” or silent hunt is upon us, when stalkers armed with long sticks and bark and twig “lukoshki” baskets set out through misty mornings to run their quarry to ground in the damp…

Staggered seating, social distancing, masks and gloves – so begins the 42nd Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF). The organizers couldn’t invite Hollywood and international celebrities to the opening ceremony, but this didn’t stop MIFF from coming up with a new and extremely rich movie program. Many of the films presented at the festival, unfortunately, will…