Culture & Customs

International Womens' Day; Russia honors the role of all women in Russian culture.

No time like Lent for some Shchi! We offer both lenten and non-lenten options for making this hearty and tasty dish.

The Caucasus is a region rich in tradition and often impenetrable to outside understanding. The modernized ritual of “bride kidnapping” is a case in point; we asked a local journalist to guide us.

The remote Russian-Norwegian-Finnish borderlands offer some of the starkest contrasts between cultures and history you will find anywhere on Earth.

This issue's Trends section looks at the impact of inflation and the dustup over Leviathan.

There has been a proliferation of professional holidays in Russia, and those falling in the spring have a peculiar "bent" toward the military and law enforcement bodies...

Leviathan is not, as virtually every mainstream critic has presumed, “anti-Russian.” I watched the movie resolutely prepared to intensely dislike it. I fully believed it would shamelessly pander to an American public eager to see a film that demonized Putin and made the country seem like a hellish landscape of unsalvageable bleakness. But that was not at all the case. 

The new year is a perfect time to try borshch, which has an interesting history.

It seems the more removed in time the USSR becomes, the more nostalgia grows for its symbols and traditions. Increasingly, these elements are worming their way back into Russian life. If they ever left.

Moscow is purging theaters, clubs and a media outlet that was at the forefront of covering protest actions.

When the Editors at Russian Life asked me to write about how my friends and I (“the younger generation”) view the current state of Russian-American relations, given the events of 2014, I honestly had to pause and think about it.

As a special gift, we share a somewhat untypical holiday story, reprinted from the pages of Chtenia, by the master humorist and short story writer Mikhail Zoshchenko.