The Pet Shop Boys in Red Square, Moscow, in 1993, during the filming of the video for Go West

The lads have loved Russia for a long time. Neil Tennant, the duo's singer, has said that he learned the Russian alphabet at the age of 14, simply out of interest in Russian culture, music and history. All of which can, in fact, be detected already in the group's early songs. In their first hit, West End Girls, for instance, addressing the heroine of the song, they sing:

We've got no future, we've got no past
Here today, built to last
In every city, in every nation
From Lake Geneva to the Finland station -

that is, they retrace the route of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station in Saint Petersburg.

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At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free. So, here is the

Frederic Leighton

Frederic Leighton. “Daedalus and Icarus”, 1869 Daedalus warns his son not to climb too high: the heat of the sun may melt the wax, but Icarus is already gazing into the distance, and the lamentations of a foolish old man interest him not in the least

The Pet Shop Boys in Red Square, Moscow, in 1993, during the filming of the video for Go West

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At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

Frederic Leighton

Attempts to resolve the problems of many years of uncontrolled mass migration

Characters from Gogol's "Petersburg Tales" on the pedestal of the monument to Nikolai Gogol on Nikitsky Boulevard, photograph of the 1960s