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They could not have known it at the time, but they were on the edge of the abyss. Revolution, war, and again war and revolution were just around the corner. But in February 1903, a grand ball was held to commemorate the 290th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty.

On January 13, 1863, the "eminent poet" Kozma Petrovich Prutkov passed away. Except he never really was alive.

Rumors flew this fall when President Putin stopped taking trips abroad. Just a bout of anxious Kremlinology, or is there something to it?

In response to the US Congress' passage of the Magnitsky Act, Russian legislators are planning a bit of list making of their own.

The head of the CIA and the Russian Defense Minister both fell from grace within weeks of one another, and both because of infidelity scandals. Sounds like a good pretext for a column...

In 1703 Peter the Great founded the first Russian newspaper. This is what it looked like and what it covered.

If even gently pressed, I will readily admit to belonging to the Just Do It school of translation. I have never been big on translation theory, not least from fear of suffering the fate of the centipede who, on being asked how he managed to walk with so many legs, promptly fell over.

The movie is almost too silly to discuss, as if Saturday Night Live decided to do a parody, but nobody but the costume-director and scene-making crew were ready. A puppet resembling Keira Knightley plays Anna; although thin, even scrawny, the animators make her look almost human.

Two stories out of Russia this weekend reinforced the stereotype that Russian entities (a) don't respect copyrights, yet (b) do value propaganda.

In this, the second of two posts on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the author recounts his discovery of the greatest novel of all time: "I had never lived a book as I lived Anna Karenina."

Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina has been called the greatest novel of all time. But can one really appreciate it as much in English translation versus the Russian original?