Archive · Art · Museums · Paris

The Louvre bought the tiara of Saitaphernes in 1896, but it was made by an Odesa jeweller

In 1896 the Louvre bought the tiara of the Scythian king Saitaphernes for 220,000 francs. Eight of the foremost specialists in antiquity and the history of art pronounced it a masterpiece and assured the museum that it would become the pride of the Louvre. The Imperial Museum in Vienna

On an Art Nouveau postcard, the white-bearded Tsar Saltan in a patterned white robe bends toward a black cat on a red carpet.

NB! · Archive · Art · Books

Tsar Saltan in the “Fairy-Tale Types” postcard series by the artist E. Sokolov

Tsar Saltan on a postcard from the series "Fairy-Tale Types" by the artist Ye. Sokolov

NB! · Archive · Architecture · Heritage · Saint Petersburg

The Restoration of the Painted Drum of the Dome of Saint Isaac's Cathedral, 1954 to 1963

Lithographed caricature of M. E. Saltykov (Shchedrin): a bearded man in spectacles with an enormous head sits at a table, beside two tiny figures.

Archive · Books · Humour

Saltykov-Shchedrin in a letter of 1 October 1858 on the powerlessness of bureaucracy

Here I am in utter distress, for I am surrounded by illiterate and senseless people and must work alone for all of them and set right what a century of chicanery has fouled… With each passing day I grow more and more convinced that bureaucracy is impotent… Saltykov-Shchedrin in

Archive · In the Press · Geography · Society

Hundreds of Jews and Jewesses were killed or wounded

The first mentions of Chernobyl in the Western press are connected with pogroms: March 1919, hundreds of Jews killed in Ukraine, in Berdichev, Zhitomir, Chernobyl, Ovruch, Belaya Tserkov, Letichev, Elisavetgrad, Vasilkov and other places.

Archive · Books · Moscow · Humour

In one place it is said that a landowner was ruined by doing up his house in Moscow in the fashionable taste

“But the sovereign himself is building a palace in Moscow!” said the censor. Gogol on the censorship of Dead Souls, 1842

Archive · Observations · Saint Petersburg · Humour

Noses in their iPhones

Photograph by Vladimir Baranovsky, 1970s, Leningrad

NB! · Archive · Museums · Heritage · Saint Petersburg

A restorer at work in the Tsarskoye Selo Museum-Reserve in 1984

A restorer at work in the Tsarskoye Selo Museum-Reserve in 1984. Photo by Vsevolod Tarasevich

Archive · Mores · Society · Humour

On 26 January 1522 the city council of Amsterdam decreed:

"…that no one shall throw snowflakes, neither woman nor man, on pain of a fine of one pound."

Archive · Books · People

Leo Tolstoy at his desk in the study at Yasnaya Polyana in 1908

Photograph by Karl Bulla

Archive · Mores

Instant biscuits, spun sugar, vanilla, cream, butter and chocolate wafers, cucumber cakes: the Soloviev Brothers, without the slightest competition, under their own supervision

A confectioner's stall on the Kotorosl Embankment in Yaroslavl in the 1910s

Archive · Geography · Society

Long Live the Conflagration of World Revolution! An inscription on the agitprop train under the command of Mikhail Kalinin, 1919

The train was created as part of a mobile apparatus of agitation and propaganda. It carried lecturers, agitators, instructors, journalists, actors and artists, as well as a travelling printing press, a cinema projector, slide projectors, and gramophones with records. The train travelled all over the country for two years