Category: Moscow

Всё–таки: nevertheless, in the end, all the same, really, finally… Little words, little words… It is my life’s work — or at least my summer challenge — to sort out some confusion experienced by readers and translators when one word has dozens of meanings and almost an endless number of possible translations. This is particularly…

MOSCOW — Vladimir Shushvalov would stop at nothing to see “Barbie.” Since the Hollywood film based on the iconic toy doll will not be shown in Russian cinemas, Shushvalov spent nearly 30,000 rubles ($335) to fly from Moscow to Astana, Kazakhstan for its premiere there last week. “I absolutely adore movies,” the 21-year-old student told…

The global craze around “Barbie” has reached Russia — even though many Russians will be unable to see the movie about the iconic doll. The movie will not be legally shown in Russian theaters due to Western studios leaving the country over the invasion of Ukraine. But that hasn’t deterred Barbie fans from dressing up…

There was no hidden advertising in the Soviet Union. Today viewers understand that James Bond wears a particular kind of watch and drives a certain brand of car for a commercial reason. But under socialism, there wasn’t much point in mentioning a particular brand of product in a radio program or movie: the filmmakers just…

Давать на лапу: to grease someone’s palm The other day someone asked me if I’d ever written about the language of bribe-giving. I haven’t. In fact, I don’t think I ever offered a bribe, although in the days before Moscow installed about a million predatory street cameras that fine you online, гаишники (traffic cops, aka…

Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, many Russian artists have been using their craft to show their resistance to the war and the Kremlin’s ever-widening crackdown on Russian society. With his latest collection of paintings, “Acting Out,” award-winning artist Pavel Otdelnov sought to produce a “reflection on the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe caused by…

On Wednesday several Russian media reported that the head of the St. Petersburg Russian Museum, Alla Manilova, cancelled a show dedicated to the late artist Timur Novikov’s works, which was set to open the next day. The show, which reportedly includes more than 80 works by Novikov and other artists, was fully mounted and ready…

On Wednesday July 19 several Russian media reported that the head of the St. Petersburg Russian Museum, Alla Manilova, cancelled a show dedicated to the late artist Timur Novikov’s works, which was set to open the next day. The show, which reportedly includes more than 80 works by Novikov and other artists, was fully mounted…

If you want to know the public mood in Russia, check out home supplies of buckwheat groats. When the war began, or when the Covid epidemic hit, demand for buckwheat soared. Some stores quickly ran out; other stores rationed sales — only five kilograms per person. In every difficult period in Russia, there is a…

С: With, from, approximately the size of It’s probably not fair to say that Russian prepositions are the bane of non-native speakers’ existence. There are other contenders for the bane claim — aspect, shifting stress, a few weird verb conjugations — but prepositions present all kinds of problems. They almost all have several, often totally…

Russia’s most acclaimed icon has officially been handed over to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Church’s leader reported on Wednesday. President Vladimir Putin in May ordered to transfer Andrei Rublev’s “Trinity” to the custody of the Church, drawing widespread criticism that moving the unstable 15th-century painting could damage it irreversably. “A historic event has taken place,”…

SHEFFIELD—“There are a lot of land mines here.” These are the first words the audience at Sheffield’s Documentary Film Festival hear from Mstyslav Chernov, the director of “20 Days in Mariupol.” The organizers of the U.K. premiere in Sheffield had announced that he couldn’t join us in person but would introduce the film by video…

Emperor Peter I loved his wife. And his wife loved mushrooms — especially fried mushrooms with sour cream. She could eat them every day, almost all day. But for some reason, the court physicians thought it was bad for her health. They even complained to the emperor. But he did not want to hurt his…

Плевать: to spit, to not care I have a friend who loves the word наплевать (to spit), only she stretches out each syllable: на–пле–вать and ends with sharp downward jab of her chin. This doesn’t mean “I spit on it” — or it does, sort of. It is a verbal description of a gesture (spitting)…

Russian theater director Yevgenia Berkovich on Monday spoke out in court against remaining in pre-trial detention. She and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk are under investigation for the charge of “justifying terrorism” for the play “Finist, the Brave Falcon.” The charge is punishable by up to seven years in prison. Yevgenia Berkovich: My opinion about this motion…

A Russian state acting school has opened enrollment for a theater arts program that will train future actors and directors for the Mariupol drama theater in occupied southern Ukraine. “The program will be carried out through in-person courses on a state-funded basis for the Mariupol Russian Drama Theater, focusing on ‘Acting’ and ‘Theater Directing’ degrees,”…

Moscow and St. Petersburg are old rivals, and not only for the title of capital city. They even argue about food and what to call it. For example, Muscovites call gyros “shaurma,” but in St. Petersburg they are called “shaverma.” Another big argument is what to call a doughnut: ponchik or pyshka? In the northern…

A group of Russians has bid farewell to dating app Tinder on Friday with a beachfront funeral in the resort city of Sochi. Tinder owner Match Group last month announced it will leave Russia on June 30, citing its commitment “to protecting human rights.” Mourners clad in black shared stories of how Tinder helped them…

Поход: hike, walk, march Like just about everyone else reading this, I watched Russia very closely for about 30 hours over the weekend, and despite all that and a lifetime of experience with the place, I have no idea what happened. What was it? Mutiny? Rebellion? Attempted coup? As I look back, it seems that…

Muslims across Russia this week are celebrating the holy festival of Eid al-Adha, or “The Feast of Sacrifice,” the second and largest of the two main holidays celebrated in Islam. The holiday, which this year takes place from June 28-July 1, commemorates the prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son on God’s orders. At Moscow’s…

This summer Pushkin House, London’s flagship independent center for Russian culture, is hosting the exhibition “Women in Black Against the War” by Russian multi-media artist Katya Muromtseva. Muromtseva, 33, has exhibited in Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as in the U.S. and Japan.   The show…

Following Bumble and Badoo, the popular dating app Tinder will leave Russia on June 30. Explaining the decision in an annual impact report published on May 1, Tinder’s owner Match Group said it was “committed to protecting human rights.” Public reaction: rivals, politicians and Runet users In the end of May Russian users of Tinder…

Amsterdam’s Hermitage museum said Monday it will change its name, a year after severing ties with the St. Petersburg version over Russia’s war in Ukraine. The museum in the Dutch capital will be called the H’ART Museum from September, in what it called a “new beginning.” It also announced partnerships with the British Museum in London,…

Moscow residents awoke Saturday to news that the Wagner mercenary group’s forces had seized control of a military command center in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and were headed toward the capital. As a convoy of thousands of Wagner fighters rapidly headed north from Rostov-on-Don, Russia’s National Anti-Terrorist Committee declared an “anti-terrorist operation” regime in…

In the grimmest of circumstances, Feb. 24, 2022 transformed Volodymyr Zelensky from a Ukrainian star into a global one. As one would expect, authors have rushed to paint portraits of Ukraine’s telegenic leader. First came “Zelensky: The Unlikely Ukrainian Hero who Defied Putin and United the World” by Andrew L. Urban and Chris McLeod (April 2022);…

Russia’s spy chief claimed Monday that Ukraine and the United Nations have agreed to remove holy relics from a revered Kyiv monastery to Europe to protect them from alleged Russian attacks. Kyiv however denied that any relics would leave Ukrainian territory. In his statement Monday, Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), said…

Residents of Russia’s second-largest city St. Petersburg flocked to the banks of the Neva River on Saturday for the city’s annual Scarlet Sails celebration. Thousands of spectators watched ships with red sails glide down the river as fireworks lit up the night sky above. On Palace Square, a number of musical acts staged live performances.…

Now that summer is truly here, the first locally grown peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants are appearing in the markets. The end of June is the perfect time to make stuffed vegetables. In the Caucasus, all vegetables, cabbage and vine leaves stuffed with meat are called “dolma.” We call our stuffed cabbage leaves golubtsy (“little pigeons”)…

Месяц: moon, month I must admit that I don’t think much about calendars or dates or months. They just are. 365 days in a year (except leap year), 12 months, a little rhyme to remember which months have 30 days and which have 31. That’s it. Of course, I’m wrong.  Today’s calendar is more or…

Last week Owen Matthews won the 2023 Pushkin House Book Prize for his book, “Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine,” called “an impressive achievement: a work of accessible history, with very vivid writing, depth and historical sweep” by Yekaterina Schulmann, the chair of the judges. The Moscow Times talked the Matthews about…

A memorial plaque dedicated to the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, which disappeared earlier this month from the former Kresty prison in St. Petersburg, has been found and handed into the police, the local Fontanka news outlet reported Thursday. Local lawyer Vladimir Filatov admitted to removing the memorial plaque, saying he was concerned it would be…

As the focus moves away from Russia in the arts, a space has opened for films from countries once considered the periphery of the Soviet Union. This year films from Georgia and Mongolia got accolades at the 76th International Cannes Film Festival. Both were directed by women and unveil the challenging and arduous daily routines…

Updated to clarify a quote. Authorities in Kyrgyzstan are increasingly at odds with the country’s newfound contingent of Russian emigres, with a spate of concert cancellations and the use of facial-recognition technology to track down Russians wanted by Moscow contributing to increased friction. On Monday the rapper Morgenshtern, who was labeled a “foreign agent” in…

Russia has held the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol since May 2022, when its brutal three-month siege of the city ended. The port city on the Sea of Azov, which had a pre-war population of 480,000, was nearly completely destroyed by a brutal Russian siege in the spring of 2022. The United Nations said it…

Georgian food has been popular in Russia for a long time, but in the mid-1930s it was almost an official part of our cuisine. Shashlik, satsivi and kharcho were almost an obligatory attribute of Kremlin banquets, and they also appeared on menus in many restaurants. In the Soviet years, Georgian cuisine was fared better than…

День России: Russia Day At The Moscow Times we follow the Russian work and holiday schedule, even though we are all living outside Russia. It might sound daft, but it actually makes sense. First of all, we’re covering news from Russia, so we need to work when Russia works and take a break when nothing…

A memorial plaque dedicated to poet Anna Akhmatova has disappeared from the former Kresty prison in St. Petersburg, which featured prominently in her most famous poem, photographer Misha Burlatsky reported Thursday. Akhmatova’s son, the writer Lev Gumilyov, had been imprisoned in Kresty, which held many political prisoners during Stalin’s Great Terror, for “leading an anti-Soviet…

The 2023 Pushkin House Book Prize was awarded on Thursday evening to Owen Matthews for his book “Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine.” Using accounts from current and former Kremlin insiders, testimony of captured Russian soldiers and on-the-ground reporting from Russia and Ukraine, Matthews — a journalist who has been covering Russia…

Nikolai Dreiden, a theater and film director, strolls along the beaches of Tel-Aviv, Israel, speaking with passion about his work and the influence of his family. He comes from a well-known lineage in the Russian theater and cinematographic world: his grandfather, Simon, was a theater critic imprisoned under Stalin, and his father, Sergei, was a…

AMSTERDAM — In the opening shots of “The Dmitriev Affair,” the viewer walks alongside Yury Dmitriev, the gulag historian who uncovered and documented Stalin-era mass graves in his home region, the northern republic of Karelia. Dressed in camouflage, with long, white hair and goatee framing his angular face, Dmitriyev silently treads through the mossy taiga…

Anyone who spent time in the Soviet Union remembers the cigarettes — their ubiquity, first of all, and that particular scent wafting out of windows, filling stair landings, and permeating clothing down to underwear and socks. Cigarettes were essential for making friends and getting through the workday, guaranteeing the sanctity of smoking breaks in the…

Leo Tolstoy liked to take long walks. He would sometimes leave the estate and walk wherever his fancy led him. One day he wandered from Yasnaya Polyana to the railway station, where a train was standing under billows of steam, ready to leave. Suddenly, a pleasant-looking lady stuck her head out of the window and…

Сборище: a crowd, a gang Are there many words in Russian that have one meaning in the singular and another in the plural? In most cases the plural just means a lot of the singular. And that’s sometimes true with сбор/сборы. Sometimes сборы are a lot of сбор, as it were. But there are a…

The Netherlands’ highest court ruled Friday that a priceless collection of Crimean gold must be handed over to Ukraine, the latest move in a legal tug-of-war spanning almost a decade. The treasures, dubbed the “Scythian Gold,” were loaned to the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam just before Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014. Both Ukraine and…

In just six months Katya, a young Russian artist and anti-war activist, went from being unable to imagine leaving Russia to being forced into emigration. “There isn’t anyone abroad to welcome me,” the artist and activist told The Moscow Times in August 2022.  “And I don’t want to fight [from another place]… when I’m here in…

“A Blank Space on the Map” is the first chapter of “Belarus in Crisis” – a fitting title for a country that faded from world news after its revolution stalled. Hansbury’s book on this “blank space” is a concise and yet wide-ranging study that corrects this cartographic crime. While the focus of the book is…

Russia’s most famous icon and one of the most important works in Russian art history, Andrei Rublev’s “Trinity,” has been put on display at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral despite significant controversy. Art historians and experts have warned that the 600-year-old “Trinity” is in such a fragile state that moving it from Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery…

The world’s largest online platform for Tatar language learners is shutting down after its Western developer chose to cease activities in Russia, ending what activists and language specialists have deemed a crucial tool for preserving the language.  Ana Tele (Tatar for “mother tongue”), had offered free lessons in Tatar, the second official language of Russia’s…

When Moby Dick smashes his head into Captain Ahab’s ship, concluding Herman Melville’s timeless classic, the ship, along with its crew, is sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The destruction, wrought in self-defence by the monstruous whale, becomes a sign of the terrible consequences of the human pursuit of power and dominance. When the…

For nearly a century, visitors came to Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery to admire the perfect harmony of Russia’s most famous icon: the “Trinity,” painted by Andrei Rublev in the Middle Ages. The almost 600-year-old artwork depicting three angels is one of the most recognizable Russian masterpieces in the world. Last month, however, President Vladimir Putin handed…

In Russia people have been arguing about what to use in okroshka — kvas or kefir — for a hundred years. But before that they were arguing about something else. Should salted plums be added? Is it better to add bits of shredded grouse or pork? What about adding sprat in tomato sauce? The word…

In 2012, the status of “foreign agent” was introduced into Russian legislation for non-governmental organizations (NGO) that received foreign financial support and engaged in what the authorities considered political activities in the Russian Federation. On Dec. 1, 2022, a new law was enacted that required them to identify themselves as foreign agents in any media…

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had an especially devastating impact on children. Thousands have been displaced from their homes and impoverished, education has been disrupted, and many families have been torn apart. For children especially, the impacts of the war will likely be long-lasting, including a greater risk of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and other…

Артист: an actor, a performer A couple of years ago I was flummoxed by a Russian word I’d never heard before and couldn’t understand: тред. People were writing things like “тред набрал 30 тысяч лайков за несколько часов” (The “tred” picked up 30,000 likes in a few hours) or “зашёл в этот тред только сказать…

Russian authorities have for the first time fined a streaming platform under its law prohibiting so-called “LGBT propaganda,” the RBC news website reported Friday, citing the federal media regulator. St. Petersburg’s Magistrate Court fined Trikolor Kino i TV 1.2 million rubles ($15,000) during a trial held Tuesday, according to the outlet. An unnamed manager at…

A Moscow court on Tuesday refused to release a theatre director and a playwright detained over their award-winning play about Russian women recruited online to marry radical Islamists in Syria. Director Yevgeniya Berkovich and author Svetlana Petriychuk are accused of “justifying terrorism” and face up to seven years in prison over their play “Finist, the…

Authorities in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar on Monday banned the use of foreign languages on public signage, local media reported. Krasnodar’s legislative assembly voted in the new rules, which will come into effect on Sept. 1.  Mayor Yevgeny Naumov said that the changes would help unite “the architectural appearance of the regional capital in…

On Saturday the artist Ilya Kabakov passed away, “surrounded by his loved ones, just shy of his 90th year,” his wife and collaborator Emilia announced online. Kabakov is considered one of the most important artists of the former Soviet Union. Born in what was called Dnipropetrovsk (then Ukrainian SSR, now Dnipro, Ukraine), he was evacuated…

A single snapshot of a madding crowd moving through a bustling capital city can only tell us so much. Any conclusions we might draw from such an image can only be made on a surface level — from clothing, facial expressions and body language. All we can do is make vague inferences.  But if one…

General Mikhail Skobelev was a hero of the Russian-Turkish war (1877-78) and liberator of Bulgaria. But in addition to his military exploits, he left his mark on our cuisine. That was quite a feat considering that he was not a gourmand and, in fact, never ever guessed that he’d go down in history for his…