Culture & Customs

Some creative prisoners decided to sculpt a full-scale model of a Topol-M mobile, intercontinental missile launcher. Out of snow.

Traditional celebrations like Maslenitsa are accompanied by new ones, like Chinese New Year. The party never stops!

Today, we officially put to print the book for our Children of 1917 project: Resilience: Life Stories of Centenarians Born in the Year of Revolution.

Think you know your vodka? Take this True/False quiz (just 12 items) about Russians and their vodka and see if you are right about that...

Russians practice their rights: heated debate, voting in North Korea, and not getting any more survey calls. 

There's a new Russian-language detective show on Netflix. It's a bit like Gogol meets House meets Sherlock. 

Let's go to Nizhny Novgorod to hear a Russian rendition of the song of the year. And then, lets meet some puppies and a vodka thief.

The new Luzhniki, the stadium in Moscow where the opening and final matches of this summer’s World Cup football (soccer) championships will be held, hosted its first match: a friendly game between Russia and Argentina.

A Russian entrepreneur and family save a village, start an agro business, and share a recipe for Tatar pies.

In which we tour four museums in four cities and towns in Russia and Ukraine, to see what they tell us about soceity more broadly.

We travel to a distant, Siberian lake, Russia’s second deepest, in search of the remains of ancient Evenk culture. The reindeer may be largely gone, but fishing is still an important, and powerful, shared tradition.

Things worth knowing on the travel front.