Restorers working in the Moscow Kremlin’s Uspensky Cathedral (built in the 1470s) have uncovered new fragments of frescoes dating from the late fifteenth century. They are likely either from when the cathedral’s first iconostasis was created, or from 1515, when the cathedral itself was painted.
Frescoes from this period were thought to be completely lost, replaced by the current layer of painting, which dates to the mid-seventeenth century. These are the oldest surviving frescoes from the fifteenth century in the Moscow region. Previously, the oldest representations of the so-called Moscow school were those in Ferapontov Monastery near Vologda, whose Virgin Nativity Cathedral frescoes are the only intact works of painter Dionisy the Wise.
Dionisy and his pupils also worked on the first frescoes in the Uspensky Cathedral, though it is too early to say who painted the newly discovered fragments, which have been hidden for hundreds of years by the iconostasis that was installed in the nineteenth century.
Restorers have been hard at work on the cathedral since 2017, seeking to optimize its humidity level, and they plan to open up the perimeter of the building’s foundation to promote better air circulation. There are also plans to lift the cathedral floor, so more discoveries are likely to follow.
Moscow’s biggest airport, Sheremetyevo, has opened its new Terminal C. Aeroflot announced it will transfer 268 international flights to the new terminal, located next to the new Terminal B, which is used for domestic flights.
Both terminals are on the opposite side of the runway from Sheremetyevo’s old, main terminal D and the Aeroexpress light rail station. Aeroflot will continue to service transatlantic Boeing 777 flights and some flights to and from Asia in the D terminal.
Passengers should note that transferring between Sheremetyevo terminals can take a considerable amount of time, as the intra-airport transportation system is still under construction.
The new “northern” terminals are connected by an underground airport train, but a platform for trains to Moscow will not be built there until 2022. Terminal C can accommodate some 20 million passengers a year and has a couple dozen cafes and restaurants, as well as several business lounges with Constructivist-sounding names like Malevich and Lissitsky.
Activists in St. Petersburg claim to have finally pinpointed the location of the grave of writer Daniil Kharms.
A master of the absurd, Kharms perished in 1942, while imprisoned in a mental asylum at Kresty Prison, where he had been committed for spreading a “defeatist mood” during the war. Kharms had pretended to be insane to avoid execution. He died of starvation during the Siege of Leningrad.
Alexander Mars, who oversees the Kharms Award, handed out since 2016 to promote progressive and avant-garde authors (the prize is a donut hole), said this winter that after several years of investigating and consulting archives, Kharms’ final resting place has been narrowed down to two mass graves at Piskaryovskoye Cemetery in St. Petersburg: #9 and #23.
Mars said they discovered that other Kresty prisoners who died during the same time period as Kharms were buried in two of the so-called “fraternal gravesites,” where over 420,000 civilian Petersburgers were buried after falling victim to starvation, cold, illness, and bombings. The graves are marked only by the year of the victims’ death.
While grave #23 is relatively small, #9 is about 100 meters long. As a result, Mars believes it would be difficult to narrow down the search further, but he said he plans to also research cemetery workers’ documents for additional information.
The Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery is dedicated mainly to the victims of the Siege of Leningrad. City authorities plan to open a new museum at the site this year, as Russia marks the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War.
Now that restoration efforts are complete, the ancient city of Kostroma has reopened Russia’s (and perhaps the world’s, if the Ministry of Culture is to be believed) only active wooden synagogue.
The Kostroma synagogue’s other claim to fame is that it is where the famous Orthodox Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn was exiled in 1927. The century-old building (built in 1907) had to have its foundation fortified, in addition to other critical fixes.
The Moscow metro is on a never-ending quest to expand, and will open nine new stations in 2020.
The capital’s underground system is in the process of making a so-called “big ring” – a circular route that is wider than the existing “ring” comprised of historical, Soviet-era stations. Three new stations are planned for the new ring segment in the east, for example in the historic Lefortovo neighborhood.
The network will also complete the outfitting of all stations with face recognition cameras, part of a multimillion-dollar surveillance program that is being criticized by rights activists and concerned citizens, some of whom have taken the city to court, demanding that authorities be completely transparent about the system’s capability and access.
In the metro, the new cameras are being installed on entrance turnstiles. This is in addition to the existing network of cameras in all train cars. There are even cameras in the metro’s toilets (booths in some stations that cost one metro ride to enter). City Hall has admitted the booths have cameras, but claimed they are only activated when the toilets are not in use, to make sure nothing has been planted inside.
President Vladimir Putin surprised everyone in January by announcing that it was time to amend Russia’s constitution, while simultaneously sacking his government (his longtime premier Dmitry Medvedev explained that a new cabinet would be more willing to institute the rapid changes the president needed).
Russians took the news in stride, while expressing surprise at the completely unknown figure of Vladimir Mishustin, the newly-appointed prime minister who was plucked from his post as head of the Russian Tax Service. At the time, he didn’t even have an English-language Wikipedia page.
Meanwhile, weeks after these tumultuous changes, no one in the Kremlin seems able to explain why Russia needed a new cabinet or an amended constitution.
Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin’s answer to the BBC question, “What is the point of amending the constitution?” has come to symbolize the confusion and surprise of even the country’s top officials:
“The point is for you, as a representative of a foreign media outlet, to take this complicated but democratic form that we are choosing – which amendments are being discussed not just by deputies, senators, regional parliaments, and in the end are to be decided by the citizens of our country – and realize it in your own countries.”
Meanwhile, Russians of all stripes, from low-level politicians to actors are offering their vision of amendments that should be made to the Russian constitution, which was written in 1993. Among the hundreds of amendments proposed so far:
The Russian comedy film Kholop (“Peasant”), released over the winter holidays, registered the highest gross earnings for a Russian film opening, at over R3 billion by the first week of February (the film was still going strong in theaters at press time) and has overtaken the previous record holder, Three Seconds. Some 11 million Russians have seen it in cinemas, according to the Central Partnership production and distribution company, which called the feat a “huge victory.”
Why has the film been so successful, dwarfing other, more ambitious productions (such as Union of Salvation, that also came out last year – a historical drama about the Decembrist uprising that did not break even, despite entire school classes being sent to see it)?
Compared by critics to The Truman Show, Peasant is about a spoiled rich young man whose father decides to teach him a lesson by sending him to a mock nineteenth-century Russian village. Grisha, the young man, wakes up to find himself a serf, and thinks he has gone back in time, but his experience is in fact a meticulously crafted artificial space with actors.
Kholop used word of mouth to attract people who rarely go to the cinema. And they went because it is not a serious, ideologically-laden drama, but rather a smart film full of social commentary. Seeing a rich brat getting violently reeducated is also a sort of “pseudo therapy” for audiences frustrated with corruption, wrote Vedomosti.
Of course, the fact that the Russian holidays witnessed no notable premieres of Hollywood films also helped.
Rostov, located between Moscow and Yaroslavl, one of Russia’s oldest cities, has finally finished restoring it seventeenth-century stables, a project that took some seven years. The building, on the premises of the Rostov Kremlin Museum, will be used to expand exhibit space, host conferences, and launch workshops. The museum plans to open the stables this spring, with an exhibit commemorating 75 years since the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War.
With just a few months left before the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, Russian track and field athletes are harboring the faintest of hopes of competing.
The doping saga that has plagued Russian athletics was extended this winter after the Athletics Federation was accused of covering up for high jumper Danil Lysenko (producing fake documents to explain why he did not show up for a scheduled doping test). At the same time, former speed walking coach Viktor Chegin, who has been disqualified for life, was seen once again coaching the national team in disguise.
Can Russia really clean up its athletics act?
Top competitors have long called for Russia’s Athletics Federation to be disbanded, and the new Minister of Sport appointed in January seems to have listened. Until a new leadership is elected on February 28, all matters of track and field are in the hands of an outside task force inside the Russian Olympic Committee, and the entire Federation board has resigned. This may be the last hope for clean Russian athletes to be cleared for competition in Tokyo under a neutral banner.
“De facto, we are losing track and field in Russia,” said Sport Minister Oleg Matytsin, though he once again denied that any doping had been endorsed by the government itself, the very accusation that started the country’s problems with the World’s Anti-Doping Agency back in 2015.
Hungary’s low-cost Wizz Air has launched new routes from St. Petersburg, flying to Bucharest and Sofia three times a week, Bratislava four times a week, and Vilnius twice a week. Fares start at just R2,000 ($31). The company hopes to eventually offer 25 destinations for travelers to and from St. Petersburg.
Opening up Pulkovo Airport to foreign destinations became possible after the application of so-called “Seventh Freedom of the Air” traffic rights: the right of airlines to carry passengers to St. Petersburg with no requirement to land in the country where the airline is registered (in this case Hungary). The move may boost the already considerable tourist influx to Russia’s second largest city, especially since electronic visas are now available to citizens from dozens of countries.
Teodor Shanin, a sociologist who worked to modernize Russia’s higher education in the humanities and social sciences, has passed away at 89. Shanin, who founded the Moscow School of Social and Economic Studies (known colloquially as Shaninka), was born Jewish in Poland in 1930. He was exiled to the Urals and later Altai with his family, which was later amnestied as Polish citizens, and lived in Uzbekistan through the end of the war. As a young man following WWII, Shanin took part in the Arab-Israeli War as a volunteer, fighting for the independent state of Israel.
Shanin changed his name from his father’s family name, Zaidshnur, when he studied in England, explaining in one interview that he was fed up with no one being able to pronounce his name. Most of his academic career was dedicated to study of the peasantry, including in Russia and Ukraine, but he also sought to modernize the way social sciences were studied in Russia after the Soviet Union fell apart, eventually launching a new university in 1995 that worked in partnership with the University of Manchester. He died in Moscow, where he was still serving as president of the university, having stepped down from the position of rector.
Conservative Orthodox clergyman Vsevolod Chaplin, once an outspoken representative of the Russian church, who later fell out with Patriarch Kirill, died at the age of 51.
Chaplin was seen by some as a symbol of Russia’s religious fundamentalism, and was long the bane of the liberal intelligentsia, often calling for radical measures to save Russia from various “western” influences.
His church career was linked with that of Kirill for over two decades, yet previously he was part of perestroika-era hippie subculture and friendly with various dissidents of the 1980s. He eventually became the PR director of the resurgent Russian Orthodox Church, and a proponent of its growing influence over public affairs, wrote religion observer Kseniya Luchenko in her obituary published by the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Chaplin is remembered by some for his radical, anti-Western, and anti-liberal statements in the early 2010s, such as that women may provoke rape with their clothing, and calling Russia’s campaign in Syria a “holy war.”
Unlike many other Church functionaries, Chaplin lived very modestly, sharing a two-room flat with his mother and younger brother in one of Moscow’s least prestigious neighborhoods.
Kirill sacked Chaplin in 2015 from his senior post as head of the Department on Relations Between Church and Society (the entire department was disbanded), but continued working in a central Moscow church as head of a parish. He died suddenly, while sitting on a park bench near his church.
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