Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Ivan Bunin (the first Russian author to win the Nobel) remarked in Accursed Days, a collection of his 1918–1919 notes from Russia: “The world had not known disappointment,” says Herzen, “until the great French revolution. Skepticism arrived with the republic…
A conservative when it came to theater, Mikhail Bulgakov was skeptical of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s avant-guard productions. In The Fateful Eggs (1925), Bulgakov wrote of a “theater named after Vsevolod Meyerhold, who, as is well known, died in 1927 during a…
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Vol. 1 of Democracy in America (published in 1835, when the author was 30): There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world which seem to tend towards the same end, although…
Legend has it that shortly after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Sergei Eisenstein staged Die Walküre at the Bolshoi. It’s not really a legend. It’s true. And why shouldn’t it be, narrowly speaking? Long before Eisenstein, Russia’s imperial opera…
David Brooks takes a look at Russia’s social disorder in a column somewhat lamely entitled Mourning Mother Russia. His take is simplistic, as Johan Maurer explains, but he is drawing attention to the social fabric of a country, refraining from…
What is the most unusual achievement of Renaissance Italian architecture? Well, the Moscow Kremlin, of course.
What is Putin going to celebrate tomorrow — an event so grand that he has invited leaders of the world to join the festivities? The victory of Good over Evil? But although the USSR fought on the side of Good,…
Yes, “Cossacks” have been in the news since the late days of Gorbachev, but I’m not sure if they could be taken seriously and if yes, whether they are related to historical Cossacks. It seems to me that the societal…
RIA Novosti explains: The Cossacks are a military estate that existed in Russia before the revolution of 1917 and served in border areas. Russia’s Cossacks numbered more than 4.4 million in 1916. There were 11 Cossack military formations in the…
The story goes this this. Brothers Daniil and Dmitry Pokrass were Soviet composers who wrote a good deal of more or less popular songs and marches from the 1930s to the 1950s. They had a brother or cousin named Samuel…
Skipping two decades and a few years, fast forward to 1940. For Stalin’s retinue, killing off two dozen thousand Polish reservists may have seemed another climax of worldwide class struggle, but something tells me Stalin had a different view of…
While I still can’t get to the main point, another brief diversion. It is common for city mobs to decide the outcome of revolutions, and Bolsheviks won mobile legions through their anti-war and anti-hierarchy propaganda. Taken to the extreme, it…