Category: Architecture

Втайне: secretly, in secret A translator friend of mine recently announced with some fanfare that he had found the most misspelled word in the Russian language. He had documented 11 misspellings, which is impressive — although I’m sure my personal record for misspelling здравствуйте over the years has topped that. In any case, the word…

When Father Alexei Volchkov signed an open letter to the Russian government in March 2022 calling for peace and an end to the war in Ukraine, he knew there would be backlash. “What happened was inevitable, really,” he told The Moscow Times. “I was severely reproached by people who were close to me. Some thought…

Although the main cinema festivals around the world are not including any films made in Russia by Russian directors this year, that doesn’t mean that Russia is absent from movie theaters in the West. Foreign directors have been exploring the Russian context in their films, with characters both vile and brilliant in films that have…

From the outside, it may seem that Moscow life hasn’t changed at all, but this is a false impression. To understand how people who remain in Russia feel, here are three poems, all written after February 2022. Their authors describe what they see around them, and also what it’s like to write poetry in Russian…

A dispute once arose in a Moscow liberal drawing room in the late 1870s. Did the heir to the throne (the future Tsar Alexander III), who considered himself purely Russian, have much Russian blood in him? The dispute was resolved by turning to the famous historian Sergei Solovyov, who happened to be among the guests.…

Клёво: cool, great, fab, super When things are good, you exclaim: Хорошо! When things are good and you are too young to legally drink you exclaim: Клёво!  If you want, you can exclaim it when you’re old enough to drink or even get a pension — but the word does have a young vibe. So…

Russian authorities have placed a street artist famous for his anti-war graffiti on a federal wanted list in relation to an unspecified crime. Filipp Kozlov, who goes by the artist name Philippenzo, is listed in the Russian Interior Ministry’s database of suspected criminals. The registry does not disclose the charges that the 39-year-old Kozlov faces.…

A controversial Russian artist has been fined for his art piece of a toy doll covered in criminal tattoos. Vasily Slonov was charged with “public demonstration of prohibited symbols” over the art piece, a round-bottomed doll modeled on the traditional Russian nevalyashka. The Central District Court of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia ordered Slonov to pay a…

MOSCOW — Loud music, people dancing and faces covered with glitter — today, parties in Russia’s capital look like parties anywhere. “As long as there is an opportunity to enjoy life, then you need to do it,” Daria, a Russian in her 20s, told The Moscow Times at a techno music festival in the Moscow region.…

The phrase “Russian sandwich” doesn’t sound entirely natural, especially since the Russian word for sandwich — бутерброд — is so clearly borrowed from German (Butterbrot, which means bread and butter). On the other hand, we’ve gotten used to the terms “Russian mayonnaise” and “Russian champagne” — the names of favorite products that have been around…

Стая наркоманов: a pack of junkies Some day when I have a lot of time and patience I will create a word map of Russian leaders’ accusations about Ukraine and the stated goal(s) of their “special military operation.” You’d think you’d have a solid idea of what the problem was and what was wrong with…

A new play has opened in London’s Marylebone Theatre on a theme that might seem jarring in these times: coerced Jewish collaboration in the Holocaust. Yet “The White Factory” remains one of the year’s most compelling plays. First-time playwright Dmitry Glukhovsky is better known for his futuristic dystopian novels about survivors of a nuclear holocaust…

Famous Soviet-Russian composer Gennady Gladkov passed away in the Russian capital on Monday aged 88, the state-run TASS news agency reported.  Gladkov is known for composing music for over 100 Soviet and Russian films, cartoons and theatrical plays.  His most famous work was a soundtrack to the 1969 Soviet animated musical “The Bremen Town Musicians.” Songs…

In March 2022, Russian writer and cardiologist, Maxim Osipov, left his home country, flying first to Armenia before settling in Germany. He now resides with his wife in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.  Osipov is the well-known author of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” (2019), which was praised by the Belarussian Nobel-prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich as being “an accurate,…

What did our ancestors eat for a quick snack? They’d grab a little pie or a kalach. The whole point of a kalach — bread with a handle — is to eat it “on the go.” You could grab the handle with dirty hands, eat the bread, and then just throw away the dirty handle.…

Эмигрант: emigrant There was a bit of a flap in the Russian State Duma in recent days that eventually reached the Russian president’s press secretary. It concerned a new creature, unknown to millions of native Russian speakers: the релокант. Can you guess what this creature is? The interesting thing about this word is that is…

We can’t live without salads; they are an essential part of our everyday life. Their names, so utterly familiar in Russia, sound strange to foreigners. We have salad Olivier; vinaigrette salad (not dressing); “herring under a fur coat” (really); a spring salad called “Mimosa” that is not a flower or a drink; and even a…

Шовинист: chauvinist Long before the war began in 2022, I’d been tracking the linguistic dehumanization of Ukrainians practiced by some Russian speakers. At first I was mostly tracking bloggers and young people; lately I’ve been listening and reading Russian media figures, leaders, public figures and even religious figures and academics. Other folks are following this…

The majority of countries all across the globe have condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But according to statistics in Russia, three quarters of Russians expressed trust in President Vladimir Putin. In January 2019, the share was 59%, but in June 2023, it stood at 78%.  Even if these figures may indicate a fear of answering…

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee last month inscribed the astronomical observatories of Kazan Federal University (KFU) in Russia’s republic of Tatarstan to its World Heritage List. The two buildings in the heart of Tatarstan, which were inscribed as a single property, is the only cultural object from Russia that made the list this year. Earlier, UNESCO…

“In Russia, it is now impossible to make any film without approval,” writer Dmitry Glukhovsky said in a recent interview with Radio Liberty.  Glukhovsky, who has been convicted in absentia of spreading “fake news” about the Russian army, went on to describe a system of censorship in which Federal Security Service (FSB) officers proofread scripts…

In 2010, when 25-year-old Christopher Miller arrived in the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut, then known as Artemivsk, he knew nothing about the country that was his U.S. Peace Corps posting. Fresh from a stint as a local journalist in Oregon, the young American found himself in a newly independent country that was struggling to…

A bowl full to the brim of a mouth-watering thick broth with vegetables, meat and a spoonful of sour cream. This is how many of us imagine a good start to any dinner. Soup in Russian cuisine is sacred. And what is the most famous and most common soup? It’s cabbage soup, which in Russian…

Непотопляемый: unsinkable On the list of Tricky Bits (highly technical term) in translation are words in two languages that have the same meaning (translator does fist pump to empty room) but different connotations (translator swears impressively in two languages). I remembered this the hard way, that is, by using one of these bad matches in…

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…