Browse Items (158 total)

This is the first home of the Russian Academy of Sciences, built in the 1710s. Peter the Great had it constructed in conjunction with his establishment of the Academy. What is most notable about this facility is how nice it is—clearly Peter places a…

The Lada 2100 (“Zhiguli”) was a type of car produced in the Soviet Union by the Lada company. The car, modeled after the Fiat 124 and marketed as the “people’s car” became available for purchase in 1970 in the Soviet Union. However, a commercial…

After Harvard Economics Professor Shleifer reached a settlement with the US. Government because of his illegal stock-buying activities in post-Soviet Russia, President Summers was accused of extreme favoritism towards his well-known friend. In…

After the death of Lenin in 1924, his body was embalmed by the Soviet government so that it could be displayed in a mausoleum. Lenin’s corpse became the focus point of a Leninist cult of personality throughout the Soviet period, and this precedent…

Black bread was, since time immemorial, a ubiquitous Russian food. Born out of climactic and economic necessity, black bread has been credited with giving the Russian peasantry the physical strength necessary to crush Napoleonic France, but also…

In 2001, Ulyana Lopatkina suffered a serious injury that forced her to stop dancing for two years, during which time she married and had a daughter. Interestingly, it was Mikhail Baryshnikov—one of the greatest ballet dancers alive and a former…

Flourishing under Stalin-era reinvention of Russian national culture, Russian lacquer crafts were creations of a Tsarist age. In fact, it was from Japanese toys and boxes that Russian craftsmen took inspiration, so it is on a borrowed canvas that…

This is a picture of the periodic table located adjacent to a statue of Dmitri Mendeleev in St. Petersburg. Mendeleev pioneered the structure of the table, which greatly increased understanding of chemical interactions. The periodic table is an…