When I was little, on the 7th November my mother and I once went to see my gran’s sister. Back in 1980s, this day was celebrated as the day of the Great October Socialist Revolution. In the even...
Back in 1946 (that’s 62 years ago) George Mikes, the author of the undying classic of How To Be An Alien, in the chapter titled How Not To Be Clever, observed, with the usual for the book irony,...
In the pictures you see, on the left, me on my first day at school in 1987, and on the right – me during my teaching practice at one of Moscow schools in 2001 (the practice was mandatory for all...
I have been writing about my home country every so often on my blog. I know that I have almost never reacted to either critical or positive comments in the media on Russian politics and economy. There...
Wednesday was my mother’s birthday, and it was a rather pleasant coincidence that Zenith, a Russian football team from St Petersburg, should be playing in the UEFA Cup Final on the day. In the m...
The symbols of our religious festivals aren’t as innocent as we’d like them to be. Recently the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg exhibited the works by Yuri Khrzhanovsky, a Russian ar...
As some of you may know, today is the Orthodox Easter. I cannot say my family or myself ever went beyond a simple mark of the day. The service in the main Moscow cathedral has been televised for years...
Earlier this week I read on TechCrunch‘s article about the Encyclopaedia Britannica giving out free one-year subscriptions to web publishers. Michael Arrington writes, “As an outsider, Bri...
In the space of the last three years it’s been twice that I came across the appeal to vote to make St George’s Day a public holiday. The campaign is still going on, and this day is still n...
Well, fear not, it’s not me. Mobile blogging still has got its limits for me: I definitely wouldn’t attempt it on the top of my local oak. Had I done, however, I’d be in exactly the ...