Books · Observations · Society · Humour
Nothing special, just the President of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, in the company of our ambassador Mikhail Kamynin, loading up on Russian books. What, one wonders, will Señor Rebelo de Sousa (by Portuguese standards, still a short surname) be reading tonight? Apart from my Telegram channel, naturally. I can
Archive · Mores · Society · People
One might suppose that the frame is an ideological statement, yet we could just as easily take the picture for a prank. If you have ever looked through a good collection of photographs of that era, the chances are that it contained something of the kind: men larking about in
NB! · Observations · Society · Humour
Don't fret that your friends run you down behind your back: try explaining to them that you are better than Britain. On the evidence of the annihilated native peoples of North America, say, if nothing else
Observations · Society · Humour
Don't know where to invest a million or two? For that sort of sum, Avito will sell you a monument to Lenin, for example. In stone, it is a million two hundred thousand; cast in bronze, two million five hundred. Not the most profitable of purchases, admittedly. Even
Archive · Moscow · Mores · Society · People
“I am an old Muscovite and from birth I lived in the Metropol. In the Second House of Soviets. Where lived those members of the Comintern who had fled arrest in their own countries, and who by the time of my birth had already been shot or were serving their
NB! · New York · Society · Pop Culture · Humour
Archive · Society
Copying archival files oneself was formally permitted as long ago as 2016, when the Supreme Court declared this restriction on archive visitors unlawful. A copy of a page could cost five hundred roubles, and this was a weighty concession, finally adopted by Rosarkhiv last year, albeit with the proviso that
Observations · Society · Humour
Nature sent a drought, and the government, as luck would have it, chose that very moment for another piece of folly. Instead of wheat they sowed maize and fodder crops, to feed the livestock that had been taken from private households since 1959; the cultivation of the virgin lands faltered;
NB! · Geography · Maps · Observations · Society · Humour
Germany and Russia. And Poland between them, naturally; how could it be otherwise. One date I have prudently blurred out, simply because I am not sure whether, where we are, mentioning it nowadays merely lands one in prison or has already progressed to the firing squad.
Cinema · Science · Society · People
A short article on the Russian prodigy and young genius Pasha Konoplev: how at four he solved complex school problems, at six scored 142 on an IQ test, at seven mastered logarithms and musical notation, at eight appeared in Solaris, and at ten published "A Study of the Variables
Art · Society
On 30 July 1914 general mobilisation was declared in Russia, following Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia a few days earlier. On 1 August Germany declared war on Russia
Archive · Moscow · Society · People
Stalin in the Kremlin in August 1941, when he learned of the German advance on Kyiv. The photograph was taken by Boris Burkov, editor-in-chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda, and preserved in defiance of an order to destroy the frame as showing the leader in an unflattering light. It is