Culture & Customs

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!

On September 29-30, 1941, Nazi troops shot over 33,000 Jews at the edge of the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev. Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem memorializing the tragedy ensures it will never be forgotten. 

Dmitry Shostakovich created classical music that spoke to modern times. Read up on his life story and listen along to some of finest works along the way.