Posts tagged as:

Culture

TV – Litvinenko and Tchaikovsky

January 22, 2007

If you’re lucky enough to live in England, the BBC are bringing you not one, but two Russia-related tv shows this week.
First up, on Monday, Panorama will be following the trail of Polonium 210 that killed Alexander Litvinenko.  You should be able to watch online after about 9pm tonight, at the BBC website.
And, later this week, [...]

Read the full article →

Russian Winter Festival

January 13, 2007

To celebrate Old New Year’s Eve, I dropped by the Russian Winter Festival, held in Trafalgar Square, London this afternoon. Lots of music, dancing, and even an appearance by Grandfather Frost himself.

Full size pictures are below the fold:

Read the full article →

Russia’s 8th richest man arrested in “Pimping case”

January 12, 2007

Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov has been arrested by French police in a sex scandal involving alleged prostitutes. Prokhorov is Russia’s tenth richest man, with a 54.8% stake in Norilsk Nickel.
None of the press agencies have quite come out and said it, but they are heavily implying that he was breaking the law by organising ‘parties’ [...]

Read the full article →

Video of Moscow in 1913

December 17, 2006

Here’s a short video clip of Moscow and the Kremlin in 1913, the last years of the Romanov era.

Read the full article →

Litvinenko TV drama commissioned

December 9, 2006

A British television channel is to make a drama about the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.
Channel 4 have been establishing a reputation as makers of quality topical political dramas recently, so I’m hopeful it will actually be quite good.

Read the full article →

“Russia is most certainly an odd place”

November 25, 2005

Tim Newman has written about his recent trip to Russia – he visited both St Petersburg and Kazan. His report is well worth a read, but what really caught my eye was his description of Russia – perhaps one of the most accurate I’ve seen. It perfectly captures the spirit of a country [...]

Read the full article →

New Lenin statue unveiled in Siberia

October 24, 2005

Good to see that in modern, democratic Russia, statue-makers are still doing a roaring trade:
A statue of Lenin has been unveiled in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, Interfax reported Monday. About 500 local people came to see the three-meter monument in the centre of Ust Kut town.
The monument was ordered back in 1987 by the [...]

Read the full article →

Captain Kirk in Irkutsk

October 10, 2005

One of the joys of writing siberianlight.net is the random stuff I find while searching the net. Take this piece of Star Trek fan-fiction I found today on Technorati, for example, in which Capain Kirk takes a trip down memory lane and (almost) visits Siberia’s finest city:
“That is correct, Colonel. Our captain has been [...]

Read the full article →

Red Russians in Queensland

October 5, 2005

Otto Pohl has just posted the first part of a series on the Russian Diaspora in Australia:
In the wake of the failed 1905 Revolution, the Tsarist regime exiled numerous Social Democrats, Social Revolutionaries and other political opponents to Siberia. Thousands of these internal exiles,however, managed to escape to Manchuria and then make their way to [...]

Read the full article →

Backstage at the Bolshoi

October 4, 2005

The Bolshoi Theatre closed for renovations earlier this year, and won’t re-open until 2008 at the earliest. However, if you want to take one last look at the old place, you won’t do better than Cyber Generation’s photo-essay, giving an intimate backstage look at the last performance at the theatre, and the party that [...]

Read the full article →

Solider Nixon

October 3, 2005

What happens when you try to buy Russian literature in small town Queensland?
So I asked the old half-deaf biddy in the second hand bookshop if she had any books by Solzhenitsyn.
“Soldier Nixon, I don’t think so. Are they crime or thrillers or what ?”
Brushing aside the concept that Stalinist era oppression might have been [...]

Read the full article →

Stupid vandals, or stupid advertisers?

September 28, 2005

How do you stop vandals from destroying your advertising posters? Russian Marketing Blog has the answer:
It seems that glass boxes with Maxim ads are broken and there are words “disgrace” and “lewdness” sprayed on them with red paint. Designers, who developed the ads, decided to outwit vandals and designed posters the way as if [...]

Read the full article →

Do you have a ‘Big Russian Soul’?

August 24, 2005

I’m embarrassed to say that I took the test, and I most definitely do not have a Big Russian Soul.

Your so-called "soul" earned 0 out of five troika matreshki.

You are utterly devoid of Russian soul. You are so far removed from my Russian nature that I’m surprised you can even understand me when I [...]

Read the full article →

More on Cyrillic

August 15, 2005

Following on from the previous post about Cyrillic vs Latin, you might want to check out this fascinating article by Art Lebedev, tracing the history of the cyrillic typewriter.  I particularly like this gem of a paragraph about the development of the modern cyrillic keyboard:
But in the late 1980s foreign personal computers arrived in the [...]

Read the full article →

Cyrillic vs Latin: Battle of the Alphabets

August 15, 2005

Via Laurence Jarvik I found this article by Sam Vaknin.  He wants Russia to abandon the cyrillic alphabet and switch to a latin one because, he argues, holding on to an archaic and over-complicated alphabet is holding back companies from investing in Russia:
According to the Russian headquarters of [Citibank], the price tag of opening the [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →