Yury Grigorovich, the towering figure of Russian ballet who led Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater as chief choreographer for three decades, has died at age 98, the Bolshoi announced Tuesday.
Born in Leningrad…
Category: Life
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Benjamin Nathans’ ‘To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause’ Shortlisted for Pushkin House Book Prize 2025
Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the award-winning books, “Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia” and “To the…
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Sergei Loznitsa’s ‘Two Prosecutors’ Brings Stalin-Era Terror to Cannes Film Festival
It begins with a stove, a stack of desperate letters, and a man too old to protest his fate. Sergei Loznitsa’s “Two Prosecutors,” adapted from an unpublished novella by Gulag survivor Georgy…
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Of Forks on the Dinner Table and Forks in the Road
Ivan the Terrible has gone down in Russian history as a symbol of unbridled cruelty and unlimited power. But times are changing. In Putin’s Russia, people are finding positive qualities in this…
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Alexei Navalny’s Posthumous Memoir ‘Patriot’ Shortlisted for Pushkin House Book Prize 2025
“Let’s face it,” wrote Alexei Navalny, shortly before his murder in prison, “If a murky assassination attempt using a chemical weapon, followed by a tragic demise in prison, can’t move a book, it’s hard to imagine what…
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When Kitchens Became Factories in the Soviet Union
The Soviet factory kitchen invented in the 1920s was supposed to be a breakthrough into a bright future — a future where women were not oppressed in the kitchen and where beautiful and free people…
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Remembering the War: Grigory Baklanov and a ‘Life, Twice Given’
My father, the Jewish Russian writer Grigory Baklanov (born Friedman in 1923), was 17 when in June 1941 the Nazis invaded the U.S.S.R. Although too young to be drafted and exempt from active duty by his employment, he managed to enlist…
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Bondianna: Anna Chapman’s Spy Memoir, Real and Imagined
Anna Chapman (nee Kushchenko) briefly enjoyed the international spotlight when she was arrested in New York and later exchanged in a a large spy swap.
In June 2010 Anna Chapman and nine others were arrested by the FBI for failing to…
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‘The Baton and the Cross’ by Lucy Ash Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025
“If there is no God, everything is permitted,” wrote Dostoyevsky. “The Baton and The Cross: Russia’s Church from Pagans to Putin,” the first book by former Moscow correspondent Lucy Ash, explores the provocative…
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Wrap Anything in Dough and Call it a Pie
Pirogi (pies) have always held a place of honor on the Russian table. Fish pies have come down to us from ancient times barely influenced by foreign culinary traditions, making them a truly national…
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