Just steps from the Mausoleum, fans could participate in a mock World Cup soccer match, buy refreshments, or try their luck kicking a ball against the “highly skilled” Robokeeper — the venue’s most popular attraction, which offered amateur players the opportunity to “test the accuracy and power of [their] kick.”
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What will future historians will see as the major Russian contribution to early 21st-century Internet culture? It might not be troll farms and other strategies for poisoning public conversation — but rather, the democratization of access to scientific and scholarly knowledge. Over the last decade, Russian academics and activists have built free, remarkably comprehensive online archives of scholarly works. What Napster was to music, the Russian shadow libraries are to knowledge.
Continue reading...The author pledges to his dear readers that when he recalls certain sentimental scenes—say, the heroine crying over a portrait, or the same heroine mending Apollo Perepenchuk’s torn tunic, or, finally, Aunt Adelaide Perepenchuk announcing the sale of Apollo Semyonovich’s wardrobe—he does so with extraordinary sorrow and a painful sense of anxiety.
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As his 1972 summit with Mao Zedong approached, President Nixon prepped by considering three simple questions: What did China want? What did the United States want? What did they both want? With a Trump-Putin summit now scheduled for Monday, we invited experts on U.S.-Russian relations to engage in Nixon’s exercise, hoping to identify some common interests between two geopolitical heavyweights. What follows are their lightly edited answers.
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With the U.S.-Russia summit approaching, I reached out to former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and current Stanford University political science professor Michael McFaul. McFaul, who recently published “From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia,” a memoir of his time in Moscow, was kind enough to provide his thoughts on the upcoming meeting between the U.S. and Russian presidents. What follows is a lightly edited version of our discussion.
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“Why does man exist? Is there a purpose to man’s life—and if there isn’t, then is life itself not, generally speaking, in part senseless?” Of course, some assistant or full professor on the state’s gravy train would reply, with unpleasant ease, that man exists in order to further culture and the happiness of the universe. But that’s vague and unclear, and, for the common man, even disgusting.
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“In view of past misunderstandings, the writer notifies his critic that the person who narrates these tales, is, so to speak, an imaginary person.”
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“This book—this collection of sentimental tales—was written at the very height of NEP and revolution. And so the reader is, of course, entitled to demand certain things of its author: real revolutionary content, grand subject matter, tasks of planetary significance, and heroic pathos—in a word, a full, lofty ideology.”
Continue reading...To quote the Washington Post, “Reporters thought this video was North Korea propaganda. It came from the White House.”
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Under Nursultan Nazarbayev’s leadership, Astana celebrates its twentieth year as Kazakhstan’s capital. Festivities for Astana Day on July 6 will attract hundreds of thousands of people to the capital. Elaborate firework displays will glitter in the skies. Pragmatism will be forgotten, and Astana will have become a carefully constructed rallying point of modern Kazakh identity.
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We heard that Donna Orwin had just published a new book called “Simply Tolstoy” and had to find out all about it.
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Like Erofeev’s Venya, our own contemporaries seem to suffer from strong disillusionment with authority — an unsurprising outcome in the face of the degradation of discourse, institutions, and stable employment. Corrupt, populist politicians and a corporatized intellectual and artistic elite offer us nothing but mediocrity and moral cowardice. Faced with this void, many people turn to dangerous substitutes, as evidenced by the opioid crisis and the re-emergence of right-wing authoritarian movements in the States and abroad.
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Two years ago, on May 1, 2016, the Twitter account @RodionTweets sent its first tweet. Since then @RodionTweets has livetweeted the events of Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, broken into 140-character-or-less snippets, from its hero Raskolnikov’s perspective. The bulk of the novel’s events take place over the course of three intense weeks in the summer, and the bulk of Rodion Raskolnikov’s tweets similarly appeared in July 2016, but the account has continued to tweet the book’s epilogues, which spread over the course of nearly two years. Finally, on April 24, 2018, Raskolnikov’s new life began and the Twitter account went silent.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has just started his new term in office and is mulling how to secure his legacy. In his fourth and likely last term, he will be working on establishing himself as the leader who returned Russia to international grandeur, stabilized the economy and increased the urban standard of living. But while Putin’s assertive foreign policy has been popular at home, it has also embroiled Russia in complex predicaments that may undo that popularity.
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The first of May has been celebrated around the world for centuries. Known as “May Day,” the holiday originated in revelries anticipating the coming of spring in the Northern Hemisphere — and with it, a sense of physical and spiritual renewal. Over the years, this festive rite of spring evolved into a celebration synonymous with workers’ rights, socialism, and the Soviet Union. But what does May Day mean today?
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Founded by the journalist Elena Klimova in 2013, Children-404 provides an outlet for members of the LGBT+ community in Russia.
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In the context of the Holocaust and other twentieth-century mass traumas, the Kantian Categorical Imperative, which underscores ethical transgression, can at times appear inadequate.
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The Washington Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s Serenade this past weekend at the Kennedy Center was a watershed moment for the company. The program heralded the emergence of a Washington Ballet signature style: Russian lyricism tempered with English restraint and enlivened with American joie de vivre.
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