Tsarskoye Selo (or "Tsar's Village") was the town containing a former Russian residence of the Romanov imperial family and visiting nobility. It is located 24 kilometers (15 mi) south from the center of Saint Petersburg. It is now part of the town of Pushkin ( which got its name in 1937 to to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of the Russian... Continue Reading →
Exactly 60 years ago today, on 4 October 1957, Earth got its first ever artificial satellite. It was the USSR made Sputnik-1. Sputnik 1 was launched during the International Geophysical Year from Site No.1/5, at the 5th Tyuratam range, in Kazakh SSR (now known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome). The satellite travelled at about 29,000 kilometres per hour (18,000 mph; 8,100 m/s), taking 96.2 minutes to complete... Continue Reading →
The Rozhdestvensky Convent, or the Convent of Nativity of Theotokos (Russian: Богородице-Рождественский монастырь) is commonly referred to just as the Nativity Convent and it is located inside the Boulevard Ring, on the left bank of the Neglinnaya River. Not only this is one of the oldest nunneries in Moscow (it was founded in the Moscow Kremlin in 1386, probably by Maria of Rostov, mother of Prince Vladimir the Bold and... Continue Reading →
The Museum is located about 15 minutes walking away from the Maryina Roshcha metro station (at the exit of which you can see the Planeta VKN Youth Center): Being rather far from the city center is not a popular tourist destination. On one hand this is a shame, because it is definitely worth visiting, but on the other hand this offers you the definite advantage of seeing such an interesting place almost devoid of other visitors, especially during the week.
If you've been reading this blog, you already know that I am deeply fascinated by Russian history and the freedom of being able to go and visit places that were once forbidden, the famous Soviet closed cities. Imagine, then, when I discovered that today you can visit a place once so secret that you were not only forbidden to visit it, but also to ever mention its very existence outside the restricted circle of a few thousand military personnel who knew about it.
Bunker 42 in Moscow is a former secret military underground center for long range bomber command, now fully declassified and turned into a privately owned museum.
The city of Smolensk is one of the oldest in Russia. The first recorded mention of the city was 863 AD, two years after the founding of Kievan Rus'. Throughout its history, also due to the fact that the city lays in the westernmost part of Russia, geographically very close to other European powers, Smolensk saw a great number of battles and foreign invasions. In the early 1400s the city was conquered and became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and with tens of thousands of people living there, Smolensk was probably the largest city in 15th-century Lithuania.
Did you know that less than a century before being admitted to the USA as the 49th State Alaska was part of Russia and it was called Russian America? Alaska was actually discovered by Russia and it was part of the Russian empire until the emperor Alexander II sold 586,412 square miles (1,518,800 km2) of land to the United States on March 30, 1867 for $7.2 million.
The Bulgakov House is situated on the ground floor of Bolshaya Sadovaya ulitsa no. 10 in Moscow, in the building where the Soviet writer used to live, and in which some major scenes of his masterpiece are set. In the novel, though, Bulgakov didn't situate the building at number 10, using instead the number 302-bis, to denounce the complexity of the Soviet administration in his time.
Pictured above is Pygmalion's point of view when admiring his beloved statue/wife in the interpretation of Italian sculptor Pietro Ceccardo Staggi (1754-1814) in his Pygmalion and Galatea (1790-1792). The attribution of the statue to Staggi comes directly from the Hermitage museum, where it is on permanent display in the European Fine Art Collection, alongside statues of Antonio Canova.
Russia Through The Lens 