“Ivan the Terrible Kills His Son,” one of Russian master Ilya Repin’s best-known paintings, was damaged by a vandal a year and a half ago. The man was motivated by his belief that the painting shows an event that never happened and is essentially “fake news” blackening the image of Ivan the Terrible. He used […]
A new exhibition at the Moscow Kremlin Museum, and the below television report about its opening, attempt to at once humanize and expand the mythology around Peter the Great. Opening with descriptions of well-known history and including descriptions of items that would be expected at a exhibition devoted to royalty, the exhibition and report also […]
As part of our SRAS program, we had a guided tour of the Peter and Paul Fortress. On a beautiful summer day, we took a tram out to the fortress. Once there, our guide started off by explaining the history of the fortress. Peter the Great established the fortress on May 16, 1703 on Hare […]
The “green line” is a self-guided tour of Irkutsk, which goes around the center of the city with several stops along it. The path is about 5k long, and can take anywhere from 2-3 hours, or even a whole day if you were to stop at even half the museums it passes. I found this […]
Moscow is a globally recognized center for the performing arts. The city hosts multiple venues for opera, ballet, music, and drama—so many, in fact, that choosing from them can be difficult. Also, many students from small towns may not have been to these types of cultural institutions before – many tend to exist primarily in […]
Activists have long campaigned for a full restoration of Russia’s famous Motherland Calls sculpture in Volgograd. Made of reinforced concrete, the massive structure has long shown concerning signs of wear – ranging from being stained by pollution to visible cracks forming. The following report details the restoration work – including the techniques and process used […]
Russia has reunited the great pre-revolutionary art collections of Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin. The collections of both Tsarist-era businessmen were nationalized after the revolution, partially auctioned abroad and then split between museums in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Each exhibition has been reported as an inspirational event, as the righting of a historical wrong, and […]
The “ticket mafia” has long been a problem in Russia. Scalpers buy tickets, often at deep discounts by employing the pensioners who qualify for them, and then sell the tickets at wildly inflated costs. This is not, however, the most interesting inefficiency in managing Russia’s cultural institutions. For instance, the story below details the Bolshoi’s […]
In Anna Melikian’s 2015 film Pro Lyubov (About Love), a film divided into vignettes focusing on modern love ala Love Actually, one of the vignettes focuses on a young woman from Japan who comes to Russia due to her love of Russian literature. While in Russia she hopes to find a Russian boyfriend. She goes […]
