July/August 2015

US-Russian relations are on ice. We aim to challenge the prevailing trend with a cross-Russia trip by two photojournalists. Join us, won't you?

History is being increasingly politicized. Case in point, a recent documentary about the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

All the news that fits.

Everything of note on the travel front.

Polygamy may be illegal in Russia, but that didn't stop a highly-placed friend of Ramzan Kadyrov from having a very public wedding to a second (at the same time) wife.

How a Russian deals with the hostility from Baltic residents about the events of 1940, even when one does not agree with or condone them.

The rise of Yaroslav the Wise as ruler of Kiev. It may not be all we think it was.

When i first arrived in Moscow, I couldn’t say much in Russian, but I could talk about the weather.

One hundred and fifty years go this July, the first part of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace was published.

On the anniversary of its "birth" we look back at the history of the "ruler of the East"...

110 years ago, the 1905 revolution set Russia on a course that would lead to war and revolution.

It is not an easy task to sell the very American sport of baseball in a time of state-sanctioned anti-Americanism. But that doesn’t stop the Gladikovs.

This summer, why not read one of the classics? As a teaser, we offer an excerpt from Dostoyevsky’s timeless classic, in a new translation by Oliver Ready.

William Brumfield has been tromping all over the Russian North for three decades, documenting soon-to-be-lost architecture and villages. He takes us to tiny Kimzha.

During the tsarist era, Russians’ perceptions of themselves were powerfully shaped by travelogues about the world that lay beyond the empire’s borders.

Seventy-five years ago this August, Leon Trotsky was brutally murdered while living in exile in Mexico. Levi Bridges visited the scene of the crime, now a veritable shrine to the Bolshevik leader.

Anna Kharzeeva is learning to cook, Soviet style, from her grandmother. We listen in, and get a fresh new recipe for summer shchi (soup).

Reviews of "Stalin: A New Biography of a Dictator," by Oleg Khlevniuk; "The Great Glass Sea", by Josh Weil; and the documentary "Faberge: A Life of its Own."

In response to Western sanctions, Russian counter-sanctions, and Russians' love of cheese, a northern monastery is using experience and equipment from Italy to make fine soft cheeses.