Culture & Customs

Today marks the 185th birthday of the artist Ivan Shishkin, whose paintings evoke Russia's beauty and vastness. With a nickname like "Forest Tsar," his trees must be good.

Maria Plotnikova acquaints us with Tchaikovsky. No, not the composer, the town named for him in Siberia's Perm Krai.

At the southeastern-most tip of Russia, where it butts up against China and North Korea, there is a beautiful marine preserve. And there are also poachers.

A new year, a new dessert!

Soviet leader Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev would have been 110 on December 19. There are plenty of fun facts and surprising jokes behind the eyebrows.

Yulia Sulzhenko takes us to her hometown, Tyumen, Siberia's western capital, and the oil and gas capital of Russia.

Photographer, painter, designer, and more, Alexander Rodchenko (born December 5, 1891) worked at the intersection of innovative art and radical politics. Here are 14 of his works. 

Vasily Kandinsky was a renowned abstract artist whose shapes and colors revolutionized twentieth-century modernist art. Here are 11 of his paintings in honor of his 150th.

On the importance of cabbage in Russian culture (and of course a recipe).

The body of Joseph Stalin was removed from the mausoleum on Red Square on October 31, 1961. It may not be as spooky as Halloween, but the former leader still haunts Russia today.

On October 14, 1991, St. Basil’s Cathedral was reopened after six decades. Here are five fun facts in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Cathedral’s rebirth.

In honor of fall, and Russians' favorite autumnal pastime – mushroom picking – we offer these two short stories by Lev Tolstoy – in both English and Russian!