Konigsberg was overrun by the Red Army 1945. And any encyclo today will tell you it’s been part of Russia ever since. But as Raymond A. Smith points out, Russia has never held any formal legal title to the Oblast at all.
At the end of the war, Germany was being given away by the [...]

I fully expected to see the old funicular railway in Svetlogorsk. Last time I was here, it was dark and they told me it was closed. What they didn’t mention - or maybe it was my poor Russian - is that the last train ran in 1960.
Not until 1973 did Svetlogorsk get a replacement. Perhaps [...]

A freak cooking accident - probably too much red wine in the bourguinon - resulted in a few cracked ribs. So. It’s been paracetamol rather than prose from me lately.
Obviously, any rib-crushing embraces with Soviet women have also been out of the question. Couldn’t even manage the typing position. But what better place to recuperate [...]

This wonderfully convoluted line from Crosby Stills Nash (now playing) just about sums up all the ambivalent attitudes to restoration in Kaliningrad.
Left to rot for fifty plus years, the former Prussian town is being extravagantly restored. But what exactly is being restored? It is not the past or the cultural heritage of any Russian who [...]

Coming across this ad featuring Anna Kournikova, two things struck me . . .
The first is that the most vehement Russophobes on the net always seem to be women. Think they might be jealous?
You can say that Russian women have a superior knack of flaunting what they’ve got. And then I remembered that, [...]

Here’s a great read for history fans - and you don’t even have to buy the book. ‘The Sealed Train’ by Michael Pearson is here on the net.
It’s an account of Lenin’s top secret journey from exile back to Russia in 1917.

The funny part about the Russian revolution, when it came, is that Lenin was [...]

Since every British tabloid has linked the dissident Litvinenko with Politkovskaya, let’s link on.
As it happens, both Litvinenko and Politkovskaya were virtually unknown in Russia. You won’t find a copy of their ’sensational’ books anywhere here - nor in the Russian language, that anyone can read.
Their combined threat to the Kremlin didn’t [...]

The Poster at Ruminations On Russia has been commenting on the recent spate of contract hits in Russia. He writes:
I am closer to becoming a billionaire than the real killers are to being captured. And you have no idea what a gap the former is.
Well, there’s a cheap shot at Putin’s social progress. Let’s [...]

It’s always interesting to read a travel piece about somewhere you visited. Just to compare notes. Today the Moscow Times obliged with a feature on Novgorod Veliky.
Staff writer Anna Malpas points out that it’s not to be confused with Nizhny Novgorod. Perhaps one should add, nor anywhere else. The other day this blog picked [...]

Winston Churchill called the sailors of the Arctic Convoys, on the Barents Sea, ‘the bravest men afloat’. Between 1941 and 1945, they ran the gauntlet of U-boats and Luftwaffe with supplies of food and munitions critical to keeping Russians alive and in the war.
The men were brave, certainly. While a regular WW2 soldier faced a [...]