This house was built in a newly planted southern garden on the far outskirts of the resort town of Yalta.…
Operation Children
The largest child rescue operation of the Great Patriotic War was led by a 24-year-old schoolteacher. In the summer of…
Three Fates, One Tundra
The Sámi, or Lapps as they were called until the 1930s, are the indigenous people of the Kola Peninsula. Worldwide,…
A Colombian in the Land of Tolstoy and the Taiga
We first met Rubén Darío Florez Arcila last year at the Russkiy Mir Assembly in Moscow. For his significant contribution…
Out of the Underworld
Dostoevsky was perhaps the first true tragedian in Russian literature. The first writer to be so comprehensively unhappy, the first…
How Tchaikovsky’s ‘mistake’ became a great opera
Today, ‘Eugene Onegin’ is performed on the stages of theaters across all continents. In the second half of the 1870s,…
Five Sisters: The Gnesin Story
Aram Khachaturian, Mikael Tariverdiev, David Tukhmanov, Iosif Kobzon, Lyudmila Zykina, Lyubov Kazarnovskaya, Filipp Kirkorov, Valeriya, Polina Gagarina, and Shaman. All…
How a peasant from Karelia became the greatest master of Fabergé eggs
Mikhail Perkhin was an amazing employee at Carl Fabergé’s firm – and the only Orthodox and Russian-born jeweler. And, at…
How a British aristocrat fell in love with Russia & taught the entire kingdom to love it
Maurice Baring was one of the few who went to Russia not on a wave of hype, but driven by…
How the French perfumed all of Tsarist Russia
Alphonse Rallet’s perfume factory was founded back in the mid-19th century. Its founder and his successors not only supplied fragrances…
