President Vladimir Putin’s cultural support foundation has awarded 1.6 billion rubles ($16.4 million) to arts and culture projects that drum up support for the war in Ukraine. Russia’s Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives on Thursday announced 303 winners of its annual competition for receiving state funding, with projects including music festivals featuring songs about the war in Ukraine, patriotic-infused…
The one-act play by Ukrainian playwright Sasha Denisova “My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion” opened in Washington, D.C. on September 11 at the Woolly Mammoth Theater. Directed by Yury Urnov and translated by Misha Kachman (who also served as set director), the largely autobiographical play is inspired by Denisova’s 82-year-old mother — Olga Ivanovna —…
Arseni Morozov’s band had just finished a set in a fundraiser for Ukrainian refugees in a Tbilisi, Georgia bar when the owner unexpectedly took the stage. “Please don’t speak Russian between songs,” he asked the audience. “Not everyone here understands it.” Morozov, the lead singer of the Russian garage rock band Sonic Death, quickly apologized.…
Amsterdam’s bustling Red Light District has plenty to offer to visitors on a Saturday evening, but a showcase of art and music of Russia’s indigenous non-Slavic communities might just have been the most unique event that took place there last weekend. Held at a local Walloon Church and organized by Netherlands-based anti-war collective Free Russia…
“Greetings, Katerinushka, my dearest beloved. I’m sending you a local radish and a bottle of Hungarian.” In January 1720 Peter I sent his beloved wife Ekaterina not only a bottle of precious wine but also… an ordinary radish. The sovereign loved this humble vegetable — and with good reason. There is an old Russian saying:…
Пусть: let, permit, request, threaten, concede Among the many useful little words in Russian, there is one that tends to be overlooked: пусть. Пусть is a very handy word that can be used to express everything from an order to a wish to exasperated acceptance to a threat. Time to polish your пусть and be…
A public row has erupted over the Russian government’s decision to ban an ethnic Yakut film from online streaming platforms over claims of nationalism. “Ayta” became the highest-grossing film ever in the Far East republic of Sakha (Yakutia), raking in more than 26 million rubles ($275,000) at the box office after its premiere in March. The award-winning…
Russia’s Oscar committee has suspended its operations and will not nominate a film to compete in next year’s Academy Awards, state media reported Friday. Last year, the head of the committee resigned after Russia’s film academy opted out of nominating a movie for the 95th Oscars. At the time there was disagreement among the Russian…
Expectations were high for the new staging of Uladzimir Karatkievich’s classic 20th century Belarusian novel, “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” brought to London’s Barbican by the Belarus Free Theatre. The directors, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, fled persecution in Belarus, and the performers hail from Belarus and occupied Ukraine. Tom Stoppard and Cate Blanchett are both…
This year Jade McGlynn, a researcher in the war studies department at King’s College London, published two groundbreaking books on the use and misuse of memory in today’s Russia. The first book released, “Russia’s War,” a finalist for the Pushkin House Book Prize, considered how the Russian population came to support, or at least not…
All over the world people have their own version of meat wrapped in dough and fried in fat or oil. In Russia the favorite versions are chebureki (singular – cheburek) and belyashi (singular – belyash). But although people love them, they get their origins and even names wrong. The word “cheburek” was barely known in…
Мудрый: wise In the pantheon of “hard things to get right in Russian” if you are not a native speaker — and sometimes if you are — right up there are “words that are almost, but not quite, alike.” Sometimes one has an extra syllable, or they have different suffixes. You think you have them…
On the eve of the opening of the Bolshoi Theater’s 248th season the theater’s general director, Vladimir Urin, spoke candidly about the theater’s policies and politics in an interview with the government-owned Rossiskaya Gazeta newspaper. Urin told the newspaper that the “theater remained ‘Bolshoi’ in these difficult times,” but over the course of the interview…
Organizers in Kazakhstan have canceled a popular Russian sketch comedy group’s tour following backlash over its visit to Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, Kazakh media reported Thursday. Kamyzyaki, veterans of Russia’s longest-running comedy television show KVN, performed and gave interviews last weekend at a World War II event in Donetsk, an eastern Ukrainian region partially controlled by Russian forces. Social…
ST. PETERSBURG — A mixed crowd of families, youngsters and pensioners filed into Gazprom Arena, St. Petersburg’s main stadium, waiting for Shaman to arrive. Some had the Russian flag painted on their cheeks, while others wore the yellow, black and white flag of the Russian Empire and the words “Ya Russky” (“I Am Russian”), the…
The abundance of appetizers on the Russian table has always amazed foreign guests. The custom of drinking a shot or two of vodka before dinner was unusual in Europe, although once foreigners got used to Russian cuisine, they didn’t turn down the vodka. And once they got used to the vodka, the understood the necessity…
On the day I went to see “Patriots,” a play about the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a Russian missile struck the Chernihiv Drama Theater, killing seven and injuring 156 more. The attack could not help but inform my perception of “Patriots” that day, but on any day Russia’s war against Ukraine has been the elephant…
Re-enactors donned 19th-century military garb this week to act out the Battle of Borodino, a turning point in the Napoleonic Wars that took place outside Moscow. While the 1812 battle between imperial Russian forces and Napoleon’s army technically ended in a Russian defeat, both sides took huge losses. The Russian army retreated, allowing Napoleon to…
Until the middle of the 19th century, some foreigners might have had a hard time doing their food shopping in Moscow. Imagine a Frenchman walking into a grocery shop to buy buckwheat groats. He asks for “sarasin.” But to his dismay, the grocer puts a bag of rice on the scale. The Frenchman wanted to…
Children in Russia, Ukraine and the Moscow-occupied territories of Ukraine marked the start of a new school year for the second time since the start of the war in Ukraine on Friday. Every year on Sept. 1, schoolchildren in Russia and several other countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union celebrate День Знаний,…
Though much of Russia will vote in the country’s regional elections on Sept. 10, early voting is already underway in the country’s most hard-to-reach areas to allow residents who cannot make it to a polling station to cast their ballots. On the Taimyr Peninsula of Russia’s Far North, election workers brought ballot boxes to the…
In Soviet-era movies, as the heroes worked they often sang about the joy of labor, their pride in the Land of Soviets, and the wise policy of the Communist Party. “We shall carry the flame of our soul, the banner of our country, onward through worlds and centuries!” sang the actress Lyubov Orlova as she…
With their access to the West cut off since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, Russian filmmakers have turned to the city of Kaliningrad as a backdrop for Europe in their pictures. Wedged on the Baltic Sea coast between Poland and Lithuania, the Russian enclave is dotted with Germanic facades, narrow streets and churches.…
In a series of photographs, a man in a military uniform rapes a young woman. She becomes pregnant. The man takes the child and stomps on the breasts of the woman, her eyes closed in death and covered with coins. These are photographs of a work of performance art called “Dvoinya” (Twins), created by Russian…
More than 70 volunteers and scientists from across Russia this week completed a major ecological cleanup effort in Russia’s Far North. The bulk of efforts took place in the village of Khatanga, which has a population of about 3,000 and is one of Russia’s northernmost inhabited settlements. The first stage of the Russian Geographical Society’s…
The once-Russian, now-American artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid got together to look back over the art they created as a team, the places they lived and the times they lived through. The occasion for this was a retrospective of their work held at the Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers University in the U.S. The…
Apples are not as simple as they seem. Perhaps no other fruit has left such a large mark in world history. The first cultivated apples appeared in ancient Rus in the 11th century during the reign of Yaroslav the Wise. It is believed that the first apple orchard was planted in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. Planting…
Potato conspiracies, Brezhnev’s funeral, and the Soviet Union are just a few of the topics covered in a video art exhibition in Moscow called Based on Real Events. The exhibition — the largest of its kind in recent years — showcases more than 30 videos that touch on politics, social issues, and everyday life. It…
For centuries people all over the world have made jam to preserve the harvest. We don’t know when exactly it appeared in the Russian kitchen, but we do know that the ancient recipe for jam is very different from the one we use today. And the big question is: Would we have liked it? In…
Дужка: a variety of hoop-shaped objects I don’t know if I want to know the names of everything because I like languages, or if I like languages because I want to know the names of everything. But I suppose it doesn’t matter. In any case, I get double — or is it quadruple? — pleasure…
Russian movie theaters have begun showing pirated versions of the Warner Bros. blockbuster “Barbie,” media reported Wednesday, amid ongoing efforts to circumvent major Hollywood studios’ screening bans in Russia. Russian film distributors adopted an illicit scheme last year by obtaining digital copies of movies shown in Kazakhstan via the messaging app Telegram — without permission…
Extreme heat has engulfed Moscow in recent days, with thermometers hitting 30 degrees Сelsius mark for the first time this year on Sunday. Though August 6 was the hottest day of the year so far, it wasn’t close to the record of 37.3 С measured on the same day in 2010, the weather portal Gismeteo…
There is an old Russian saying: “A spoonful of tar spoils a barrel of mead” — which means that a small defect can ruin something big and beautiful. But wait a minute — could a tiny speck of tar really ruin an entire barrel of mead? Why couldn’t you just spoon it out along with…
Блат: crimes (in prison and among criminals); connections (outside prison by everyone else) Alexei Navalny got in trouble in prison again, this time for saying two words: крыша (roof) and хата (hut or peasant house). So what is the problem with those two words? He was told that they “входят в сборник жаргонных слов и…
Collage artist GM_collage combines photos of symbolic people, places and things in surreal arrangements to lay bare the contradictions, nuances and hypocrisies of modern Russia. When contacted by The Moscow Times, the artist declined to share details about their identity, only saying that they are from Belarus and now live in Georgia. The Moscow Times…
In the opening scene of “Grace,” a new film independently funded and produced in Russia by director Ilya Povolotsky, a teenage girl has just gotten her first period. But it isn’t her mother who helps her as she enters womanhood. Instead, a woman she doesn’t know steps out of her father’s minivan and hands her…
Director Ivanka Polchenko described “Vanya is Alive,” her latest play, as “the most important play written in Russian since the start of the war” in an interview with The Moscow Times before its U.K. premiere. “It was written as the invasion was unfolding, so it’s very immediate.” The play follows Alya, the loving yet delusional…
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, one of Russia’s most renowned literary and cultural figures, announced in a Telegram post that she could no longer write. “That’s it,” she wrote. “I’ve always written about my people. About the people who live in Russia. I felt sorry for them, the drunks and wretches… But now I don’t feel sorry for…
Veteran journalist Tom Parfitt came up with the idea of a solo walk through Russia’s North Caucasus after reporting on the bloody Beslan school siege by Islamic militants in 2004. The undertaking was, as he puts it, his way of trying to “dilute” the memories of that horror. The result is a poignant, beautiful and…
The Russian state appeared on the map and watermelons appeared on the table at almost the same time for people living in what is now Russia. The country got its present name after Grand Duke Ivan IV of Moscow was proclaimed tsar in 1547. The land he possessed became known as the Russian Kingdom. And…
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…