Calendar Briefs

110 years ago Moscow’s Trams

April 6, 1899, the first electric tram was inaugurated in Moscow, on Nizhnaya Maslovka street. Seven years previous, the first electric tram in the Russian empire was installed in Kiev, followed a few years later by cars in Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinoslav  (now Dnepropetrovsk) and Kursk. Trams were not introduced to St. Petersburg (then the capital) until 1907. Horse-drawn rail cars – konki – had been in use since the 1870s, but they were proving unable to keep up with growing demand for reliable and swift public transport. Over the next half-century, trams secured themselves a treasured place in Muscovites’ hearts, often the subject of romantic poems and songs.

80 years ago
Southern Poet

March 6, 1929, the poet and writer Fazil Iskander was born in Sukhumi, Abkhazia (Georgia). Known for his highly descriptive prose, evocative of life in the Caucasus, his works in the 1960s and 1970s were rife with subtle observations on human nature and biting critiques of Soviet society. One critic noted the “the Rembrandt-like expressive force of his details.” Perhaps his best-known work is Sandro from Chegem, a picaresque novel that offers a colorful history of pre- and post-revolutionary life in the Caucasus.

170 years ago  Two Fingers in the Handful

March was a good month for music seventeen decades ago. On March 9, 1839, Modest Mussorgsky was born. Then, almost exactly five years later, on March 6, 1844, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was born. The two Russian composers were two of the Moguchaya kuchka – the Mighty Handful – that shaped Russian classical music in the middle of the 19th century (the other three in the circle were Cesar Cui, Alexander Borodin and Mily Balakirev). They were unified in their desire to create a musical style that was uniquely Russian, not imitative of European traditions.

195 years ago A Gracious End

On March 30, 1814, France capitulated to Russia, ending the War of 1812 begun by Napoleon’s attack. That same day, Tsar Alexander I entered Paris, after declaring to the de facto mayor of Paris, “I have only one enemy in France, and that enemy is the man who has deceived me in the most shameful manner, who has abused my confidence, who has betrayed every oath he gave me, who has brought my country the most iniquitous, the most abominable war… but I have only this one enemy in France. For all the French, save him, I have great esteem… tell the Parisians that I do not enter within their walls as an enemy and that it rests entirely with them to have me for a friend.” Alexander and the Russian troops were greeted as liberators and the tsar pushed for lenient terms for France in the peace treaty signed two months later.